The Ontario Securities Commission on Accounting and Auditing from the 1960s to 2008 – Part 1: 1960s to 1985*

We present Part 1 of a historical review and analysis of the role played by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) in accounting and auditing from the 1960s onwards. Part 1 deals with the period from the 1960s to 1985. Parts 2 and 3 will treat the roles played by the first five Chief Accountants, from 1986 to 2008. As the principal Canadian stock exchange in recent times has been the Toronto Stock Exchange, the OSC has been the most important securities market regulator in Canada. Prior to this article, the academic and professional accounting literature has been largely barren on the OSC’s evolving role on accounting and auditing issues.     

PLATFORM COMPETITION WITH ‘MUST‐HAVE’ COMPONENTS*

In platform‐component systems with indirect network effects, some ‘must‐have’ components are so popular with consumers that they create large, discrete indirect network effects when they become available on a platform. For example, ESPN is a must‐have component of cable TV platforms. This paper examines how platform market structures determine exclusive versus non‐exclusive contracts between platforms and components. It shows that a component provider is more likely to sign exclusive contracts with a single platform if its popularity is high, the platform market share difference is large, and cross‐platform indirect network effects are low.     

Taxation and Income Distribution Dynamics in a Neoclassical Growth Model

We examine how changes in tax policies affect the dynamics of the distributions of wealth and income in a Ramsey model in which agents differ in their initial capital endowments. The endogeneity of the labor supply plays a crucial role, as tax changes that affect hours of work will affect the distribution of wealth and income, reinforcing or offsetting the direct redistributive impact of taxes. We consider different ways of financing government expenditure and find that policies that reduce the labor supply are associated with lower output but also with a more equal distribution of after‐tax income. We illustrate these effects by examining the impact of recent tax changes observed in the United States and in European economies.     

Intergenerational Allocation of Government Expenditures: Externalities and Optimal Taxation

This paper studies optimal capital and labor income taxes when the benefits of public goods are age‐dependent. Provided the government can impose a consumption tax, it can attain the first‐best resource allocation. This involves the uniform taxation of the cohorts' labor income and a zero capital income tax. With no consumption tax and optimally chosen government spending, labor income should be taxed nonuniformly across cohorts and the capital income tax should be nonzero. Deviations of the public goods from their respective optima create distortions. These affect the labor supply decisions of both cohorts and capital accumulation, providing a further reason to tax (or subsidize) capital income.     

AID, ECONOMIC FREEDOM, AND GROWTH

Foreign aid has often been intended by donors to entice recipient nations into policy and institutional reforms favorable to private sector economic development. In this study, we investigate the relationship between aid and changes to economic freedom in recipient nations over the 1990–2000 decade. The evidence is mixed. In general, we find that foreign aid has no significant effect on economic freedom overall. However, using a hedonic approach on the different categories of economic freedom, we find that aid has still managed to contribute toward a policy and institutional environment favorable to growth, as the different categories of economic freedom improved by aid more than offset those which are harmed by aid, in terms of their impact on growth . ( JEL 010, 019)     

COINTEGRATION AND CHANGES IN REGIME: THE JAPANESE CONSUMPTION FUNCTION

In this paper we examine a model of cointegration where long-run parameters are subject to switching between several different cointegrating regimes. These shifts are allowed to be governed by the outcome of an unobserved Markov chain with unknown transition probabilities. We illustrate this approach using Japanese data on consumption and disposable income, and find that the data favour a Markov-switching long-run relationship over a standard temporally stable formulation. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is the Truth in Lending Being Told with the Annual Percentage Rate as the Measure of the Cost of Credit?

This paper demonstrates that the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) measure required under the Federal Reserve System's Regulation Z is not consistent with the mathematical procedures involved in calculating the interest charges on a loan. The APR is never a correct cardinal measure of the true cost of credit, and it is a correct ordinal measure only under specific restrictive conditions. Since the APR always understates the true cost of credit, and since a correct cardinal measure is already familiar to the finance profession, it is difficult to justify the required disclosure of the APR. The Annual Effective Rate should be required as the summary measure of the true cost of credit for all types of consumer loans.