Renaissance attachment to things: material culture in last wills and testaments1

Over the past decade ‘material culture’ has become a sub‐discipline of Italian Renaissance studies. This literature, however, has focused on the rich and their objects preserved in museums or reflected in paintings. In addition, the period 1300 to 1600 has been treated without attention to changes in the relationship between people and possessions. The article turns to last wills and testaments, which survive in great numbers and sink deep roots through late medieval and Renaissance cities and their hinterlands. They reveal aspirations and anxieties about things from post‐mortem repairs to farm houses to pillows of monk's wool. These aspirations changed fundamentally after the Black Death. Earlier, during the ‘commercial revolution’, ordinary merchants, artisans, and peasants on their deathbeds practised what the mendicants preached: stripping themselves of their possessions, they converted their estates to coin to be scattered among pious and non‐pious beneficiaries. After the Black Death, testators began to reverse tack, devising ever more complex legal strategies to govern the future flow of their goods. This work of the dead had larger economic consequences. By encouraging the liquidation of estates, the earlier mendicant ideology quickened the velocity of exchange, while the early Renaissance attachment to things did the opposite.     

The Interaction between Internal Control Assessment and Substantive Testing in Audits for Fraud*

We examine the interaction between internal control assessments and substantive testing in a model of fraud detection. The purpose of our study is to examine a two‐stage model of the auditor‐manager interaction in which the auditor assesses the “likelihood” or possibility of fraud in the first stage and conducts substantive tests in the second stage. We examine the allocation of audit resources across these two distinct facets of the audit. We find that, regardless of the auditor's allocation, the probability of undetected fraud remains the same, but the allocation of some audit resources to internal control assessment may provide cost savings for the auditor.     

A survey of commercial laundry detergents - how effective are they?: Part III: powders,liquids and hard water

The effectiveness of 42 detergents, 11 non-phosphate containing powdered detergents, 12 phosphate containing powdered detergents, 11 unbuilt liquid detergents and eight built liquid detergents, of varying formulations, in cleaning a standard soiled fabric in water of varying hardness was evaluated. Powdered detergents were found to be significantly affected only at very high water hardness levels. There was no significant difference between washing in warm and hot water for the liquid detergents, except for a melaleucaoil based detergent which performed significantly better in hot water. Increasing water hardness had no significant effect on liquid detergents. Powdered detergents performed better than liquid detergents in cleaning the standard soiled fabric. While no one detergent was significantly better than the others, in general, washing with detergents that contained phosphates did give somewhat better results in warm water. Detergents that contained bleach as an additive did not result in whiter fabric.     

The Dividend Disconnect

Many individual investors, mutual funds, and institutions trade as if dividends and capital gains are disconnected attributes, not fully appreciating that dividends result in price decreases. Behavioral trading patterns (e.g., the disposition effect) are driven by price changes instead of total returns. Investors rarely reinvest dividends, and trade as if dividends are a separate, stable income stream. Analysts fail to account for the effect of dividends on price, leading to optimistic price forecasts for dividend‐paying stocks. Demand for dividends is systematically higher in periods of low interest rates and poor market performance, leading to lower returns for dividend‐paying stocks.     

SOME REFLECTIONS ON COMPARABLE WORTH

Despite its somewhat impudent tone, this paper examines a major controversy. "Comparable worth" has its proponents and detractors, but as in most debates, neither side fully appreciates the maintained hypotheses of the other. From an economic point of view, the disagreement seems to boil down to differences of opinion about whether the "excessive supply" of women to "women's jobs" is a result of their different utility functions or of their different constraints. There also has been a serious confusion of the "normative" with the "positive," some oversight of the potentially large regulatory costs that would accompany comparable worth legislation, and a tendency to consider only the partial-equilibrium consequences of these measures. Each of these considerations is examined in detail, with the conclusion that while comparable worth measures might alleviate some inequities in the short term, the long-term consequences could seriously aggravate the very problem the policy was intended to solve.     

After the Black Death: labour legislation and attitudes towards labour in late-medieval western Europe

The Black Death spurred monarchies and city-states across much of Western Europe to formulate new wage and price legislation. These legislative acts splintered in a multitude of directions that to date defy any obvious patterns of economic or political rationality. A comparison of labour laws in England, France, Provence, Aragon, Castile, the Low Countries, and the city-states of Italy shows that these laws did not flow logically from new post-plague demographics and economics—the realities of the supply and demand for labour. Instead, the new municipal and royal efforts to control labour and artisans' prices emerged from fears of the greed and supposed new powers of subaltern classes and are better understood in the contexts of anxiety that sprung forth from the Black Death's new horrors of mass mortality and destruction, resulting in social behaviour such as the flagellant movement and the persecution of Jews, Catalans, and beggars.     

The Information Content of Segment Disclosures: Australian Evidence

This paper investigates whether the voluntary decomposition of consolidated earnings disclosures into industry segments has information content in the sense that such disclosures better enable investors to predict earnings. The broad rationale underlying the experimental design is that if segment disclosure does enable investors to better predict earnings then residual abnormal returns (after controlling for unexpected earnings) surrounding the earnings announcements of firms providing segment disclosures should on average be significantly lower than a matched' group of firms that do not provide this type of disclosure. Using a short event window design, our results support this view.