Monday, March 14, 2016

Code of conduct for economic modellers?

INK BOTTLE“One of the fundamental differences between extremes of Right and Left is this: in most instances hatred moves the former; fear the latter.”
~John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (courtesy of Rod Dreher)

“Mourning, thought Albert, is nothing but a word. People contrived it to make things simpler. But what you actually feel for the dead isn’t sorrow, isn’t pity either—what hurts so [effing] bad when someone disappears forever is nothing more than the realization that you’ve been alone from your very first day in this world, and that you’ll stay that way till the end.”
~Bathroom quotes existentialism

 *ABC Four Corners crew grateful for support after being detained in Malaysia

Christian ‘Prophet’ Loses His Buttocks to a Hungry Lion While Trying to Prove God Would Save Him Alternet

Code of conduct for economic modellers? (Australia, and note there is audio at the link)



Margaret Cunneen has launched a ferocious attack on watchdogs such as the Independent Commission Against Corruption and their "punishers" in the media, warning that "hard won freedoms and protections under common law" are at risk of being "inexorably eroded" Margaret Cunneen attacks her punishers

Luigi Zingales post ~ “Why this blog?”:
By gathering information on the nature and cost of this subversion of competition, by distributing this information among the public at large, and by making this information salient, media outlets can reduce the power of vested interests. By exposing the distortions created by special interests, they can create the political demand for a competitive capitalism

Robert Wood, Cayman Companies Plead Guilty To U.S. Tax Evasion, Handing Over American Accounts

Smart watches that enable exam cheating

A spelling mistake in an online bank transfer instruction helped prevent a nearly $1bn heist last month involving the Bangladesh central bank and the New York Fed, banking officials said. Unknown hackers still managed to get away with about $80m, one of the largest known bank thefts in history. Spelling mistake prevented bank heist

The bounty hunter white knight hacker ?

Steven Bank (UCLA) presents Executive Pay: What Worked? (with Brian R. Cheffins (Cambridge) & Harwell Wells (Temple)) at Colorado today as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium Series hosted by David Hasen and Sloan Speck: CEO pay is a controversial issue in America but there was a time, often overlooked today, when chief executives were not paid nearly as much as they are now.

People “also like to party at the same time and to see movies and concerts with other people” so there is a desire to coordinate leisure-time as well as work-time. The coordination of leisure-time is the subject of an excellent paper by Young and Lim, Time as a Network Good: Evidence from Unemployment and the Standard Workweek, in Sociological Science - Social Animal Farm

Money Laundering and the City of London's "Crime Scene": Haven of Tax Havens for the Mega-Wealthy  

RSA 2016: Potential U.S., U.K. Data Deal Would Mean Fluid Data Transactions in Criminal Investigations Government technology, 1/3/16. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a potential cooperative agreement between the United States and the British government that would provide a reciprocal framework for data sharing between both governments and private industry Criminal Investigations
*Cyberspace, the cloud, and cross-border criminal investigation The limits and possibilities of international law 

At The Dallas Morning News, becoming truly digital means starting over

Inside the third-floor newsroom, The Dallas Morning News looks like a lot of American newspapers. Fluorescent lights stretch across low ceilings. The carpet is speckled gray and sufficiently stained. The floors creak. One elevator only goes to the second and fourth floors, never the third. The Morning News is housed, for now, in what journalists there call the …

 “When I compared humanity to a flower growing in the shadow of a munitions factory,
it may be that I was being unfair to flowers.”


Offshoring to impact jobs market in 2016, survey claims
Accountants Daily, 2/2/16. A significant number of organisations are considering offshoring core roles within their accounting and finance teams in 2016, which may have implications for the accounting jobs market, according to the latest findings of the Robert Walters Global Salary Survey.



MYOB on acquisition trail as Xero battle heats up
The Australian, 4/1/16. MYOB is targeting smaller rivals in the enterprise sector.

Accounting software house MYOB has flagged more acquisitions in 2016 as it seeks to fill product gaps in its ongoing market share tussle with listed trans-Tasman archrival Xero.

Meet the BuzzFeed editor whom data journalists love


Collusive Tax Evasion and Social Norms
CESifo Working Paper No. 5167, Jan 2015. Although collusive tax evasion by buyers and sellers of commodities and also by employers and employees is widespread all over the world, it has rarely been analyzed in the tax evasion literature. To fill this gap and to compare collusive tax evasion with independent tax evasion, this paper develops a simple non-cooperative game-theoretic model and confirms the model’s predictions in a laboratory experiment.
 
Are HMRC planning to ignore country-by-country reporting?  

"Study Shows How Much Work It Takes to Be Supreme Court's Friend": Adam Liptak will have this new installment of his "Sidebar" column in Tuesday's edition of The New York Times. Law professors Allison Orr Larsen and Neal E. Devins have posted online at SSRN their article titled "The Amicus Machine."

Brookings – Jesse Bricker, Alice Henriques, Jacob Krimmel and John Sabelhaus: “Most available estimates of US wealth and income concentration indicate that top shares are high and rising in recent decades, but there is some disagreement about specific levels and trends. Household surveys are the traditional data source used to measure top shares, but recent studies using administrative tax records suggest that those survey-based top share estimates may not be capturing all of the increasing concentration. In this paper we reconcile the divergent top share estimates, showing how the choice of data sets and methodological decisions affect the levels and trends. Relative to the new and most widely-cited top share estimates based on administrative tax data alone, our preferred estimates for both wealth and income concentration are lower and rising less rapidly in recent years.”