The Development of Specialist Industry Knowledge in Government Auditing

Government auditors play an important role in overseeing public agencies, yet there is little understanding of the types of knowledge that specialist industry auditors require in this environment and how this knowledge is acquired. This study develops a portfolio of knowledge items that various sources have suggested are important for industry-specialist auditors. It was found that the items perceived to be of greatest importance to government auditors were contained under the broad knowledge categories of "accounting", "auditing", and "entity-specific factors". Most of the specialised knowledge is acquired on the job, although some of this knowledge may be better acquired through formal training.     

Assurance Services and Associated Research Opportunities

Discussions on research opportunities in the assurance services area have so far originated in North America. Two of the better known research perspectives have been those presented by Elliott (1995) and Kinney (1998). These have tended to emphasise the changing landscape for assurance services and the changing relationship between the assurance provider and the user. This paper provides a further consideration of future research opportunities from both an economic and behavioural perspective.     

REVEALED POLITICAL POWER

When is a polity biased? Consider an “outsider” who observes policy data but observes neither citizens’ preferences nor the underlying distribution of political power. He views political power as if it were derived from wealth‐weighted voting, where the weights determine the wealth bias. Positive weights favor the rich whereas negative ones favor the poor. We show that any policy data is rationalized by any wealth‐weighted system. However, policy and polling observations together imply explicit bounds on the set of rationalizing biases. Accumulated data narrows this band. The inferential model is consistent with models of political competition for campaign contributions.     

SOCIAL SECURITY AND LABOR SUPPLY INCENTIVES

Many provisions of the Social Security program distort an individual's labor supply incentives. In particular, the payroll tax, the earnings test, the offsetting actuarial adjustment, and the dependence of the size of future benefits on the level of current earnings all affect the net return to extra work. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the size of the net tax rate on labor income in a variety of circumstances, taking into account all these provisions, as well as the personal income tax. We find that the Social Security Program on net in the past has provided a large subsidy to labor supply, which for many people effectively offset the personal income tax. This subsidy rate, however, has been declining steadily over time     

Children's participation in household tasks as portrayed by national television advertisements in the U.S.A.

This paper provides a content analysis of portrayals of children's participation in household tasks in national television advertisements within the U.S.A. The analysis indicates that children are rarely shown working in the home, even when they could help. Furthermore, parents are shown routinely performing tasks children could have done for themselves. The resulting stereotypes are clearly drawn: children are shown to be non-productive and parents are portrayed as servants. Such portrayals may be counter-productive in the context of growing time pressures in the household and the potential benefits that families might realize by working together towards common goals.