Surface Terms as Counterterms in the AdS/CFT Correspondence

We examine the recently proposed technique of adding boundary counterterms to the gravitational action for spacetimes which are locally asymptotic to anti-de Sitter. In particular, we explicitly identify higher order counterterms, which allow us to consider spacetimes of dimensions d<=7. As the counterterms eliminate the need of ``background subtraction'' in calculating the action, we apply this technique to study examples where the appropriate background was ambiguous or unknown: topological black holes, Taub-NUT-AdS and Taub-Bolt-AdS. We also identify certain cases where the covariant counterterms fail to render the action finite, and we comment on the dual field theory interpretation of this result. In some examples, the case of vanishing cosmological constant may be recovered in a limit, which allows us to check results and resolve ambiguities in certain asymptotically flat spacetime computations in the literature.