The Information Systems Content Area on the CPA Exam: Does Candidate Age Matter?

This study examines scores on the Business Environment and Concepts (BEC) section of the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination. The BEC examination includes six content areas, one of which is Information Systems and Communication (INFO SYS). The relationship of candidate age and candidate performance for the BEC examination was examined, along with each of the six related content areas that comprise the BEC exam. The results show that candidate age is negatively related to scores on the BEC examination. The results also show that age is negatively related to five of the six content areas of the BEC examination. No relationship was found between performance on the INFO SYS content area and candidate age. These results suggest that information systems knowledge is retained with age. These findings are of interest to accounting and information systems educators and CPA examination candidates

Enforcement and Public Corruption: Evidence from US States

We use high-quality panel data on corruption convictions, new panels of assistant U.S. attorneys and relative public sector wages, and careful attention to the consequences of modeling endogeneity to estimate the impact of prosecutorial resources on criminal convictions of those who undertake corrupt acts. Consistent with system capacity arguments, we find that greater prosecutor resources result in more convictions for corruption, other things equal. We find more limited, recent evidence for the deterrent effect of increased prosecutions. We control for and confirm in a panel context the effects of many previously identified correlates and causes of corruption. By explicitly determining the allocation of prosecutorial resources endogenously from past corruption convictions and political considerations, we show that this specification leads to larger estimates of the effect of resources on convictions. The results are robust to various ways of measuring the number of convictions as well as to various estimators

JUDICIAL CHECKS ON CORRUPTION

Judicial oversight is widely regarded as an important check and balance on the abuse of governmental power. The literature identifies two important components of this oversight function: judicial independence and constitutional review. However, recent work using country-level data indicates that the effectiveness of constitutional review is largely determined by the rigidity of the constitution. My dissertation builds on this work by investigating whether judicial independence and constitutional review are deterrents to a specific type of abuse of power by government officials: corruption in office. Since the appropriate way to measure corruption, which is defined as the abuse of public office for private gain, remains an unsettled issue, I use both measures of corruption derived from criminal convictions data and measures of corruption derived from survey data. In the case of the former, I propose a new empirical strategy that explicitly recognizes the distinction between the unobserved number of corrupt officials and the observed number of convictions for corruption. I begin by examining whether differences in judicial independence and constitutional rigidity at the state level in the United States explain the observed variation in the number of corruption convictions across states. I investigate these issues empirically using annual data for the years 1996-2005. Judicial independence is assessed by looking at judicial remuneration, method of selection, and term length. To assess constitutional rigidity, I use the legislative majority needed in each state to propose constitutional amendments, the provision (or lack thereof) for constitutional conventions, and the provision (or lack thereof) for popular initiatives to amend the constitution. I find that both judicial independence and constitutional rigidity are significant predictors of corruption. The coefficient estimates indicate that in states where judges have a higher degree of independence (higher remuneration, merit plan selection, or longer terms), there is less corruption. Moreover, states that have more rigid constitutions (higher legislative majorities required to propose constitutional amendments) experience less corruption. These findings, which are new to the literature, suggest that policy reforms which promote judicial independence and make it more difficult to alter constitutions have the potential to mitigate the harmful effects of corruption that have been documented in other studies. To develop additional insights, I conduct a similar empirical investigation in a cross-country setting. Since I do not have data on corruption convictions at the country level, I use several survey-based measures, from Transparency International, the World Bank (Kaufmann et al., 2007), and the Political Risk Survey Group. My measures of judicial independence and constitutional review are drawn from a variety of sources. I obtain indices of judicial independence from the Economic Freedom of the World Report, published by the Fraser Institute, from the Political Constraint Index Dataset, and from the La Porta et al. (2004) study cited earlier. The constitutional review index is taken from La Porta et al. (2004) as well. Like most of the literature, I analyze these data using linear regression methods: ordinary least squares, weighted least squares, and panel data techniques. Since data availability varies across indices, I conduct my analysis on cross-sections of between 37 to 165 countries for various years between 1995 and 2005. I then extend my analysis to panels of data with cross-sectional and time-series observations for 1998 to 2005. The evidence on judicial independence from the cross-country analysis is generally consistent with that from the United States data. I find strong support in favor of my hypothesis that higher judicial independence is associated with lower corruption levels, ceteris paribus. This finding is robust to the way corruption and judicial independence levels are measured, to the estimation technique, and, in general, to the inclusion of various control variables. However, I do not find the expected relation between corruption and constitutional rigidity. It appears that countries with more rigid constitutions experience more corruption using the same controls as for the judicial independence models. In their study, La Porta et al. (2004) show that constitutional review is a guarantee of political freedom measured by indices of democracy, human rights and political rights, but not of economic freedom. This suggests that it may be possible to reconcile the findings from the cross-country analysis with the evidence for the United States by gaining a better understanding of the relation between political freedom and economic freedom

The Information Systems Content Area on the CPA Exam: Does Candidate Age Matter?

This study examines scores on the Business Environment and Concepts (BEC) section of the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination. The BEC examination includes six content areas, one of which is Information Systems and Communication (INFO SYS). The relationship of candidate age and candidate performance for the BEC examination was examined, along with each of the six related content areas that comprise the BEC exam. The results show that candidate age is negatively related to scores on the BEC examination. The results also show that age is negatively related to five of the six content areas of the BEC examination. No relationship was found between performance on the INFO SYS content area and candidate age. These results suggest that information systems knowledge is retained with age. These findings are of interest to accounting and information systems educators and CPA examination candidates

Judicial checks on corruption in the United States

Corruption, Checks and balances, Judicial independence, Constitutional rigidity, D72, D73, P16,