Hidden assets

Hidden Assets – the Great Oxymoron

One has to recognise that if a prosecutor were required to prove on evidence that a defendant has secreted assets from the view of the court the confiscation regime would be least effective in those cases to which it is particularly targeted; confiscation orders would be lowest in the cases of those high-level criminals who have sufficiently substantial assets to justify the cost and risk of us...

Hidden assets: health insurance reform in New Jersey.

Intangible Assets

Intangible assets are a very economically significant asset class yet are largely excluded by accounting conventions from corporate balance sheets. Ownership (or control) of intangible assets can allow firms to differentiate their offerings to customers and establish some degree of competitive advantage. However, intangibles do not, apart from a few cases of licensing, generate value on their o...

Confidential Assets

Bitcoin is an online distributed ledger in which coins are distributed according to the unspent transaction output (UTXO) set, and transactions describe changes to this set. Every UTXO has associated to it an amount and signature verification key, representing the quantity that can be spent and the entity authorized to do so, respectively. Because the ledger is distributed and publicly verifiab...

Social Assets ¤

We present a model incorporating both social and economic components, and analyze their interaction. The notion of a social asset, an attribute that has value only because of the social institutions governing society, is introduced. In the basic model, agents match on the basis of income and unproductive attributes. An attribute has value in some equilibrium social institutions (matching patter...