Showing results 1 - 10 of 19
| Karthik Ramanna
June 12, 2020, Opinion, "Beyond its human toll, Covid-19 has wrought upon us a daunting economic toll. In a matter of just two weeks in mid-March 2020, entire industries and sectors were brought to an abrupt halt. In the UK, for instance, car manufacturing fell from more than 70,000 cars in April 2019 to just 197 cars in April 2020; for further contrast, the UK made more than 120,…
| Karthik Ramanna
Friedman at 50: Is It Still the Social Responsibility of Business to Increase Profits? Karthik Ramanna, April 15, 2020, Paper, "Fifty years ago Milton Friedman famously argued that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, which today are at record highs. And, as public institutions falter, business is now offering to step into the void. We must resist this (further) intrusion of business into the public sphere, as it…
| Karthik Ramanna | Jonas Heese
Is the SEC Captured? Evidence from Comment-Letter Reviews. Jonas Heese, Karthik Ramanna, April 8, 2017, Paper, "SEC oversight of publicly listed firms ranges from comment letter (CL) reviews of firms’ reporting compliance to pursuing enforcement actions against violators. Prior literature finds that firm political connections (PC) negatively predict enforcement actions, inferring SEC capture. We present new evidence that firm PC positively…
| Karthik Ramanna
Ruling From the Shadows. Karthik Ramanna, November 21, 2015, Opinion. “We’ve come to expect bickering from our politicians. We’re often exasperated by this state of affairs and sometimes we yearn for a quieter, gentler age, when compromise wasn’t a dirty word. But the raucous rivalry in Washington has its benefits: a political process thick with competition. By contrast, political competition in other important parts of our democracy is…
| Karthik Ramanna
Political Standards: Corporate Interest, Ideology, and Leadership in the Shaping of Accounting Rules for the Market Economy. Karthik Ramanna, 2015, Book. "Prudent, verifiable, and timely corporate accounting is a bedrock of our modern capitalist system. In recent years, however, the rules that govern corporate accounting have been subtly changed in ways that compromise these core principles, to the detriment of the economy at large. These…
| Karthik Ramanna
Thin Political Markets: The Soft Underbelly of Capitalism. Karthik Ramanna, Winter 2015, Paper. "'Thin political markets' are the processes through which some of the most complex and critical institutions of our capitalist system are determined—e.g., our accounting-standards infrastructure. In thin political markets, corporate managers are largely unopposed—because of their own expertise and the general public's low awareness of the issues. This…
| Abigail Allen | Karthik Ramanna
Auditor Lobbying on Accounting Standards. Abigail M. Allen, Karthik Ramanna, December 22, 2014, Paper. "We examine how Big N auditors’ changing incentives impact their comment-letter lobbying on U.S. GAAP over the first thirty-four years of the FASB (1973-2006). We examine the influence of auditors’ lobbying incentives arising from three basic factors: managing expected litigation and regulatory costs; catering to clients’ preferences for…
| Karthik Ramanna
Do Managers Have a Role to Play in Sustaining the Institutions of Capitalism? Rebecca Henderson, Karthik Ramanna, October 2014, Paper. "In a capitalist system based on free markets, do managers have responsibilities to the system itself? If they do, should these responsibilities shape their behavior when they engage in the political processes that structure the institutions of capitalism? The prevailing view—perhaps most eloquently argued by…
| Karthik Ramanna
Network Effects in Countries' Adoption of IFRS. Karthik Ramanna, August 22, 2013, Paper. "If the differences in accounting standards across countries reflect relatively stable institutional differences (e.g., auditing technology, the rule of law, etc.), why did several countries rapidly, albeit in a staggered manner, adopt IFRS over local standards in the 2003–2008 period? We test the hypothesis that perceived network benefits from the extant…
| Abigail Allen | Karthik Ramanna
The Auditing Oligopoly and Lobbying on Accounting Standards. Abigail M. Allen, Karthik Ramanna, August 19, 2013, Paper. “Since at least the 1970s, the audit market in the U.S. has functioned as an oligopoly, with a few large firms providing audit services for the vast majority of public companies. The past twenty-five years have witnessed a steady tightening of the oligopoly, with the number of big audit firms (hereafter, the Big N) declining…