David Kerr

Alcohol consumption is associated with significant social and economic challenges for nations worldwide, including alcohol-related healthcare costs and alcohol-related crime. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), even moderate drinking correlates with greater health risks compared with not drinking at all. These health risks include physical harm to a person’s heart, brain, liver, and other organs; impaired social functioning; reduced work performance; and increased incidence of alcohol-related violence and injury (e.g., physical and sexual assault and drunk driving-related injuries and death). Although personal health and social problems are correlated with alcohol consumption across genders, women experience disproportionately worse problems associated with alcohol-related crime and family disruption. At the societal level, alcohol use coincides with substantial negative economic problems, including increased healthcare costs, often covered by the government; reduced worker productivity; and higher criminal justice system costs. This paper applies an econometric analysis to evaluate the association between alcohol consumption and key social and economic factors and suggests actions that business firms, government entities, universities, and other organizations can take to reduce alcohol-related harm, such as encouraging sobriety in the workplace, offering alcohol-related counseling services, and not establishing associations with nor accepting payments of any kind from alcohol beverage companies. The findings have implications for business managers, government leaders, policy-makers, and others.

Past and current advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have resulted in a significant impact on business and accounting. Over time, AI has slowly transformed from the 1950s to today, from rule-based systems, also known as expert systems, to the deep learning architectures and sophisticated neural networks of modern generative AI. Early AI accounting applications of expert systems included a GAAP-based expert system to assess the appropriate accounting treatment for business combinations and an expert system to determine the proper type of audit report to issue. Recent accounting expert systems have been developed for document analysis, fraud detection, evaluating credit risk, and corporate default forecasting. The purpose of this study is to examine key events in the history of AI, current applications, and potential future effects pertaining to management accounting and society overall. In addition, the relationship of AI with economic and social factors will be evaluated. The study’s findings will be of interest to management accountants, businesspersons, academic researchers, and others who are concerned with artificial intelligence and its impact on management accounting and society overall.

In this study, we examine major cryptocurrencies, present notable fraud cases, describe fraud risks, and analyze cryptocurrency financial performance. People debate whether cryptocurrency is an investment opportunity, the new Dutch Tulip Bubble, or a giant Ponzi scheme. There have been a number of high-profile fraud cases associated with cryptocurrencies, such as the FTX scandal in late 2022, thereby making fraud a real concern to current and potential future investors. Regarding financial performance, cryptocurrencies experienced a major collapse in value in the most recent period of the study, about three times worse than the major stock market indices. While in prior periods, cryptocurrencies have significantly outperformed stock market indices, recent fraud cases and the extreme volatility of cryptocurrencies indicate that investing in cryptocurrencies comes with much higher risk than traditional stock market investments. The debate over the investment potential of cryptocurrencies continues, whether they have long term value or are simply the new Dutch Tulip Bubble. The study’s findings will be useful to investors, regulators, and academic researchers regarding the cryptocurrency industry.

Hispanic/Latinos in the U.S. bear an excess burden of type 2 diabetes (T2D) . In type 1 diabetes and insulin-treated T2D, continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) is an established technology to guide therapy, yet CGM use and studies are rare in people with/at-risk of non-insulin treated T2D and ethnic minorities. In this study, CGM was used to assess breakfast glycemic response in free-living adults with or at risk of non-insulin treated T2D. For 9-14 days, 35 Hispanic/Latino adults (28 female, median HbA1c 6.0% [IQR 5.5%, 6.8%]) wore blinded Abbott Freestyle Libre CGM and logged food via the MyFitnessPal app. Start and peak time of glycemic responses associated with a glucose rise ≥20 mg/dL between 5-a.m. were manually annotated. Median variation between annotated and logged time was 39 [20, 78] minutes. Participants were stratified using HbA1c into at risk for T2D, pre-T2D, and T2D. Median starting glucose (SG) ; maximum glucose rise (Max GR) ; time-to-peak (TTP) ; and incremental area under the curve over 2, 3, and 4 hours (iAUC2hr, iAUC3hr, iAUC4hr) were computed (Table 1) . The T2D group had significantly higher post-breakfast glycemic measures than the at-risk group for all measures. The T2D group also had higher measures than pre-T2D for all but Max GR. Increases in response from at-risk to pre- to T2D in Hispanic/Latino adults suggest post-breakfast glycemic profiles may potentially be used to monitor diabetes progression. Disclosure: A.Pai: Employee; Apple. R.F.Santiago: Research Support; Abbott. W.C.Bevier: Research Support; Abbott Diabetes. N.M.Glantz: Research Support; Abbott. S.Barua: None. A.Sabharwal: None. D.Kerr: Advisory Panel; Abbott Diabetes, Novo Nordisk A/S, Sanofi, Consultant; Evidation Health, Research Support; Novo Nordisk A/S, Stock/Shareholder; Glooko, Inc., Hi.Health. Funding: Elsevier Foundation

Based on data from 760 PCAOB inspection reports issued between December 2006 and April 2021 for 305 non‐U.S. audit firms, this paper analyses changes and trends in PCAOB inspection traits, inspection outcomes, audit firm characteristics and firms' reactions to those inspections. We find significant changes have occurred in several areas, including changes in audit quality for both principal‐auditor engagements and referred‐work (i.e., other auditor) engagements, audit deficiency rates for both Big‐4 affiliated firms and unaffiliated firms, firms' responses to inspections and several other changes. We also find a significant iteraction between the firm's network affiliation and the firm's role in the engagement (i.e., principal auditor vs. referred work). Further analysis of this interaction reveals that when unaffiliated firms perform referred‐work engagements, they have better PCAOB inspection outcomes than when performing principal‐auditor engagements. However, affiliation with a network mitigates this outcome.

We say that two free probability-measure-preserving actions of countable groups are Shannon orbit equivalent if there is an orbit equivalence between them whose associated cocycle partitions have finite Shannon entropy. We show that if the acting groups are sofic and each has a w-normal amenable subgroup which is neither locally finite nor virtually cyclic then Shannon orbit equivalence implies that the actions have the same maximum sofic entropy. This extends a result of Austin beyond the finitely generated amenable setting and has the consequence that two Bernoulli actions of a group with the properties in question are Shannon orbit equivalent if and only if they are measure conjugate. Our arguments apply more generally to actions satisfying a sparse connectivity condition which we call property SC, and yield an entropy inequality under the assumption that one of the actions has this property.

We develop a dynamical version of some of the theory surrounding the Toms-Winter conjecture for simple separable nuclear C*-algebras and study its connections to the C*-algebra side via the crossed product. We introduce an analogue of hyperfiniteness for free actions of amenable groups on compact spaces and show that it plays the role of Z-stability in the Toms-Winter conjecture in its relation to dynamical comparison, and also that it implies Z-stability of the crossed product. This property, which we call almost finiteness, generalizes Matui's notion of the same name from the zero-dimensional setting. We also introduce a notion of tower dimension as partial analogue of nuclear dimension and study its relation to dynamical comparison and almost finiteness, as well as to the dynamical asymptotic dimension and amenability dimension of Guentner, Willett, and Yu.