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A significant disease of concern in captive populations of snakes is gastric cryptosporidiosis, caused by Cryptosporidium serpentis, a gastrointestinal, protozoal parasite that can cause varying degrees of morbidity and mortality. The purpose of this study was to understand physiological responses of eastern indigo snakes (EIS; Drymarchon couperi) infected with C. serpentis. Body condition index (BCI), heterophil:lymphocyte ratio (HLR), bactericidal ability (BA), sheep red blood cell hemolysis-hemagglutination assays (SRBC), and plasma corticosterone levels (CORT) were compared between EIS across cryptosporidiosis infection states including cryptosporidia infection positive with clinical signs, infection positive without clinical signs, infection-recovered, and infection-free snakes. We found snakes that had recovered from C. serpentis had significantly lower SRBC titers than C. serpentis–negative snakes (P < 0.05). Recovered snakes had significantly higher BCI than infection positive with clinical signs, infection positive without clinical signs, and infection-free snakes (P = 0.00198). Female EIS had significantly higher CORT levels than males (P = 0.0112), BA had a significant positive relationship with HLR (P = 0.0333), and BA had a significant relationship with SRBC (P = 0.0170). These results give meaningful insight into reptilian physiology of disease and show that snakes recovered from C. serpentis may have remaining negative effects of cryptosporidiosis on their immune system. Results from this study may aid conservation projects in determining suitability for release of EIS that have been infected with C. serpentis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental flaw in the methods that academics and practitioner bodies have proposed to account for price changes is that they assume the real and monetary sectors are independent. This is the logic of classical macroeconomics pre‐Keynes/Friedman, which long since has been discredited by theory and evidence. Both economy‐wide and idiosyncratic shocks to firms' factor prices are unlikely to be positively correlated with their financial strengths, as assumed by the price adjustment methods that have been proposed. This helps explain the historical reluctance of governments and regulatory bodies to embrace proposed accounting standards that require firms to adjust their financial statements for either general or firm‐specific price changes. For example, firms then would tend to report stronger balance sheets at a time of weakened financial positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic role of an accounting regime is to increase welfare through its effects—in conjunction with complementary institutions—on firm and household behavior. I review three major streams of the archival literature (real effects; price effects, including value relevance; and costly contracting), in terms of what they can and cannot reveal as proxies for welfare effects. One conclusion is that the partial correlations and average effects that predominate in this literature have provided valuable insights into the role of accounting in the economy, but provide limited and misleading proxies for welfare effects. A major concern is that teachers, students, and researchers—indeed, regulators and standard setters—raised on this literature could lose sight of, and underestimate, the fundamental contribution of accounting to aggregate welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]