Fahrettin Okcabol

Fatal attractions in the agency relationship

Abstract This paper shows how public interest accounting can be considered a monitoring service in an agency theory sense, and as such, forms part of the optimal bundle of services offered to a client by a professional firm. The arguments are illustrated with respect to the white collar crime market. A crime valuation equation provides empirical estimates of the wealth affects of an average crime; data is then used to assess the derived demand for a new white collar crime monitoring service. In the spirit of positive accounting research, the paper supplies extensive empirical evidence to show that accountants are already heavily engaged in the white collar crime market; these services form part of the utility maximising equilibrium that is a public as well as a private optimum.

Dismantling Financial Disclosure Regulations: Testing the Stigler‐Benston Hypothesis

State regulation of capital markets in the US and the UK climaxed soon after World War II. Thereafter, this “contested terrain” has been the site of a series of intense conflicts and struggles over the form and extent of regulation. Leading academic protagonists include George Benston and the Nobel Laureate George Stigler; both provided an intellectual spur for dismantling the apparatus regulating national capital markets. In essence, these theorists support market processes and oppose using the state′s bureaucracy as a means of regulation. Surveys literature that critically appraises Benston and Stigler′s work and provides an empirical test of a number of hypotheses derivative of their work. Using evidence from court filings and other sources previously unexamined in the accounting literature, reveals significantly high levels of security law violations among firms currently exempt from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing requirements – particularly where there is high information asymmet...