Evaluating the participation of the self-employed in undeclared work: some evidence from a 27-nation European survey

In recent decades, it has been widely assumed that undeclared work is rife amongst the self-employed. Until now, however, few have evaluated the extent and nature of the participation of the self-employed in undeclared work and whether they do so out of choice or necessity. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap. To do this, an extensive 2007 Eurobarometer survey on undeclared work is reported comprising 26,659 face-to-face interviews conducted in the 27 member states of the European Union. The finding is that some 1 in 12 of the 1,842 self-employed respondents surveyed had participated in undeclared work in the previous year, although the propensity of the self-employed to engage in undeclared work varies significantly both socio-demographically and spatially. Analysing whether they do so out of choice or necessity, meanwhile, various ratios of involuntary-to-voluntary participation in undeclared work are found to prevail across different populations, places and types of undeclared work. The paper concludes by reviewing the implications for policy. Its argument is not only that state authorities targeting the self-employed alone will fail to eradicate undeclared work but also that a more variegated approach is required if the participation of the self-employed in undeclared work is to be efficiently and effectively tackled.     

To tell the truth: A discussion of issues concerning truth and ethics in accounting

Such major scandals as the savings and loan failures in the late 1980s and 1990s, the Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom and Tyco corporate scandals, Arthur Andersen’s demise, and the current crisis of the financial system have all been linked directly or indirectly to false, misleading, or untruthful accounting. Thus, in a pragmatic sense the question of the veracity of accounting or what it could mean for accounting to be true seems to exist. The assertion of a false or misleading financial report implies some belief that there could exist a true or not-misleading report. Accounting-standard setters have finessed this issue by agreeing that “decision usefulness,” not truth, is financial reporting’s ultimate objective. Over time they have gravitated to a coherence notion of truth to provide rationales for accounting policy. The result has been a serious conflict between the content of financial accounting and the auditing of that content. In this paper we describe this conflict and its consequences and, relying on John McCumber’s work, provide an argument about how accounting scholars and practitioners might begin to think more cogently about what a truthful type of corporate reporting might be. We suggest that accounting-standard setters have too narrowly construed what accounting’s role in democratic society is and how the contradictions of current standard-setting jeopardize the essential professional franchise of accountants, the audit function.     

Use of donor‐specified donation splitting: a technique to understand the impact of financial management on donor trust

• Two experiments investigated donors' willingness to split their donation into a proportion that the charity could use for administration costs and a portion that could be used to deliver the charity's services. Experiment 1 found that participants in the condition given the opportunity to split their donation into an amount for administration costs and an amount for service delivery gave a significantly smaller proportion of their overall donation to administration costs, when compared with participants in another condition who were simply asked what proportion of their donation they would be happy for the organization to use for administration costs. Experiment 2 manipulated the amount of information participants (donors) received about the breakdown of a charity's administration costs but found no significant change in the amount donated to administration. Both experiments show that donors were willing to donate approximately 15% of their donation directly to charity administration costs. Results are discussed in terms of understanding how a charity's financial management might be influencing donor's trust in the charity and providing charities with a degree of certainty in the proportion of donations they can spend on administration costs.

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Government regulation and quality in the US beef market

We show how government regulation played a critical role in shaping the beef industry over the past century. Technological developments in the late 19th century led to a highly concentrated meatpacking industry and fostered a national market for beef in the US, and the development of a national market for beef led to regulations to ensure quality uniformity, especially USDA grading. We explain the problems with beef quality created by USDA grading using tools from information economics. Because USDA’s fairly coarse grading system failed to measure significant aspects of beef quality, beef production suffered from the multi-tasking problem, which led producers to focus on producing larger quantities of beef while ignoring quality issues. We show that producing high quality beef requires either ex ante input controls or ex post sorting. In turn, we show how newly developed programs such as USDA quality certification and branding are incentivizing production of higher beef quality and dealing with information problems arising under USDA grading. We conclude with the implications of the regulatory history for current regulation of beef markets.