Advertisements A This book examines concentration on the market for public company audits, the potential for smaller accounting firms’ growth to ease market concentration, and proposals that have been offered by others for easing concentration and the barriers facing smaller firms in expanding their market shares. This is an edited and excerpted version. B Like it or not, the automobile industry is now and will remain an overwhelming factor in the lives of most people. If not an owner and driver, then as a pedestrian or a breather of air which is being polluted by the gas-guzzling and vile-air belching monsters created for our individual hedonistic pleasure. This book presents issues of current interest to those who cannot ignore their presence. C This book highlights the importance of studying similarity of business cycles across countries and answers the theoretical question about the behavior of fluctuations in economic activities over different phases of business cycles. This is done by analyzing cross-country data that provides sufficient empirical justifications on the behavior of economic activities to conclude that business cycles are alike. Furthermore, the book maintains, from the recent empirical research, that business cycles fluctuations are asymmetric. D Amidst a sharp rise in commodity investing, many have asked whether commodities nowadays move in sync with traditional financial assets. The authors provide evidence that challenges this idea. Using dynamic correlation and recursive cointegration techniques, they found that the relation between the returns on investable commodity and U.S. equity indices has not changed significantly in the last fifteen years. The authors also find no evidence of any secular increase in co-movement between the returns on commodity and equity investments during periods of extreme returns. The information in the book is adapted for the special needs.