Sure, he's called Jacob Neilson and he wrote a shit tonne of books on the subject about ten years ago.
Although I understand that its the norm to ignore previous computing history for the illusion of inventing something, more so if it's pretty.
It's Jakob Nielsen. While he can be a bit of a smartass sometimes and is not undisputed in the usability community, his books are definitely worth reading.
Guess you ignored the "excluding call-to-authority" part of my post.
No one has tested this form. So just putting it down seems premature.
I'd prefer people to be data driven, than just cargo culters.
If you Google "checkout conversion remove field," you should see a number of articles on this, including some with A/B tests. The trend seems to be that the fewer fields shown or required, the better conversion is.
Do you have any data that backs that up? (excluding call-to-authority and anec-data)