The Effect of Practitioner Recommendations on the Tax Judgments of Small Business Owners and Managers*

This study addresses conflicting results between prior research documenting a client demand for aggressive practitioner-prepared returns and research establishing taxpayer preferences for accurate returns and cautious reporting behavior. Rather than rely on practitioner reports of client aggressiveness, the tax reporting preferences of clients are examined in afield experiment mailed to small businesses across the country. After subjects had indicated ex ante beliefs about the likelihood of independent contractor status, they significantly altered their behavioral intentions in the direction of a preparer's recommendation. This implies that prior results with practitioner samples may have been biased by the practitioners' personal views. Nonetheless, some aggressive subjects were not as willing to follow the preparer's advice as were the conservative subjects. Evidence is presented on variables that correlate with aggressive tax decision making.     

Making Sense of Greek Austerity

The process of approving a Greek drawing on funds provided by the international community is now familiar. There is concern about the prospect of securing an agreement between the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB), and Greece, which satisfies all parties. This paper suggests that all parties to the agreement have interests in an orderly resolution of the Greek crisis that keeps Greece in the Eurozone. Furthermore, it argues that disagreements and delay before eleventh‐hour agreements can best be explained politically. The paper first demonstrates how Greece, the IMF, and the EU each have a clear interest in finding an orderly solution to the Greek crisis that allows it to remain in the Eurozone. It then outlines the incremental nature of the package and its strategic benefit both for the European banking sector, and governments in Greece and the Eurozone more broadly.     

The Economic Consequences of a Hung Parliament: Lessons from February 1974

The British general election on 10 May 2010 delivered Britain's first hung Parliament since February 1974, and in the run‐up, the Conservative party made much of the economic difficulties Britain faced in the second half of the 1970s in order to try and convince voters that anything other than a Tory vote would risk exposing the nation to the discipline of financial markets. The question of how well equipped an exceptional kind of British government is to deal with exceptional economic circumstances is therefore of paramount importance. This paper argues that the Conservative party made too much of the impact of the 1974 hung Parliament in precipitating subsequent economic crisis and suggests that as such, there is no reason to assume that the Conservative–Liberal coalition government is ill‐equipped to manage British economic affairs in difficult circumstances.     

Jurisdictional Integrity, Polycentrism, and the Design of Democratic Governance

Political and managerial processes are creating polycentric networks that transcend the traditional ideas of jurisdictional integrity in state-centric systems. Jurisdictional integrity refers to the political and legal competence of a unit of government to operate within a spatial and functional realm. An intrinsic element of jurisdictional integrity in a democratic system is that citizens are enabled to give consent to and pass judgment on the exercise of authority by that governmental entity. The concept of jurisdictional integrity is shown to apply differentially in relation to the traditional institutions of government in comparison with the emergent complex of quasi-governmental agencies, special purpose bodies and multi-organizational collaborations. Distinctions are drawn between club, agency and polity entities within this emergent organizational field. Problems to be faced in the design of institutions for network governance under conditions of polycentrism are identified and solutions reviewed. The potential of consociationalism to enable collective decision making across a polycentric system is highlighted. Informal norms are shown to be essential in enabling such a system for network governance to operate effectively.     

CONTRACTING IN THEORY AND IN PRACTICE: SOME EVIDENCE FROM THE NHS

The contract is the main mechanism for governing transactions within public sector'quasi markets'. This article explores the nature of the contracting process in the light of new empirical data from a qualitative study of the development of contracting for hiv / aids services within the National Health Service. These data are compared with four possible models of the contracting process emerging from the academic literature, classical, relational, regulated and pseudo contracting.
The White Paper on the nhs reforms uses a classical concept of contracting, in which purchasers are represented as making well informed and unrestricted choices between competing options. This bore little relation to the process observed within the four purchasing organizations studied. Instead, elements of all the models were observed, with the dominance of any one model varying with different situations, times and localities. Competition was only patchily evident, with purchasers more commonly encouraging co-operative relationships between providers to preserve stability. Attempts to utilize the contract process to mould and reconfigure services were often hampered by restrictions imposed by regulations and slow implementation of new mechanisms. Contracting was also adversely affected by rapid organizational change and lack of adequate information. It is concluded that contracting in the nhs is an evolving process and has yet to achieve its full potential as a management mechanism.