Political Standards

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 changes have been driven by the private agendas of certain corporate special interests, aided selectively—and sometimes unwittingly—by arguments from business academia With Political Standards, Karthik Ramanna develops the notion of “thin political markets” to describe a key problem facing technical rule-making in corporate accounting and beyond. When standard-setting boards attempt to regulate the accounting practices of corporations, they must draw on a small pool of qualified experts—but those experts almost always have strong commercial interests in the outcome. Meanwhile, standard setting rarely enjoys much attention from the general public. This absence of accountability, Ramanna argues, allows corporate managers to game the system. In the profit-maximization framework of modern capitalism, the only practicable solution is to reframe managerial norms when participating in thin political markets. Political Standards will be an essential resource for understanding how the rules of the game are set, whom they inevitably favor, and how the process can be changed for a better capitalism.

List of Abbreviations List of Tables List of Figures Preface 1. Introduction 2. The Benchmark: What Should GAAP Look Like? 3. Goodwill Hunting: The Political Economy of Accountability for Mergers and Acquisitions 4. The Shrinking Big N: Rule-Making Incentives of the Tightening Oligopoly in Auditing 5. Why Fair Value Is the Rule: The Changing Nature of Standard Setters 6. Local Interests in Global Games: The Cases of China and India 7. My Own Private Company Council: How a New Accounting Rule-Maker Is Born 8. Political Standards: Lobbying in Thin Political Markets 9. Managers and Market Capitalism Afterword Bibliographic Note Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Karthik Ramanna is professor of business and public policy and director of the Master of Public Policy Program at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University.

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