Transparency would help to address the audit market problem

Nicolas Véron responds to a consultation by the UK Financial Reporting Council and makes recommendations on how to address the Â?audit market problemâ?? resulting from the presence of only four international audit networks. Eventhough serious problems would be created by the disappearance of one of these Â?Big Fourâ??, policymakers should not try to protect them at any cost. Before envisaging measures on audit firm liability or change in ownership rules, more evidence should be gathered on key issues of the debate, and firms should provide more transparency about their financials and governance arrangements.

Help Fill the Word Gap!

Our language suffers from a word shortage. There are literally thousands of new phenomena that make modern life increasingly frustrating because we lack the words to aid us in dealing with them. This is because our surroundings change faster than our wordsmiths can provide us with the verbal handles needed to manipulate them

The HELP inequality on trees

We establish analogues of Hardy and Littlewood's integro-differential equation for Schrödinger-type operators on metric and discrete trees, based on a generalised strong limit-point property of the graph Laplacian

From the help desk

Welcome to From the help desk. From the help desk is written by the people in Technical Services at StataCorp and deals with issues that they have found to be of concern to a large fraction of Stata users. It is the rare column in this series that deals with sophisticated programming issues because such issues, by definition, are not of concern to a large fraction of Stata users. From the help desk discusses the use of sophisticated programs and the use of sophisticated statistics. Copyright 2001 by Stata Corporation.internet, web, ado-files, Stata executable installation, updates, downloading, user-written additions, packages, search, find

Stretching the limits in help-seeking research

This special section focuses on help seeking in a wide range of learning environments, from classrooms to online forums. Previous research has rather restrictively focused on the identification of personal characteristics that predict whether or not learners seek help under certain conditions. However, help-seeking research has begun to broaden these self-imposed limitations. The papers in this special section represent good examples of this development. Indeed, help seeking in the presented papers is explored through complementary theoretical lenses (e.g., linguistic, instructional), using a wide scope of methodologies (e.g., teacher reports, log files), and in a manner which embraces the support of innovative technologies (e.g., cognitive tutors, web-based environments)

Would Wage Concessions Help the Steel Industry?

[Excerpt]The American steel industry is dying. 150,000 steelworkers are laid off, and thousands of them will never work in steel again. The steel companies will report losses of some $2 billion for 1982, and Wall Street analysts predict— advocate—that as much as 20 per cent of the industry\u27s primary capacity will be eliminated. The loss of steel jobs threatens more than a dozen local and regional economies with decades of Depression-like conditions. And the worst is not likely to be over soon. Even though most people recognize that the primary cause of this situation is the misguided and mean-spirited policies of the Reagan administration, public opinion seems to have accepted a simple logic: If the industry is in such trouble, steelworkers should help it by granting concessions on wages and work rules