We provide a new and more complete analysis of the origins of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, one of the most severe environmental crises in North America in the twentieth century. Severe drought and wind erosion hit the Great Plains in 1930 and lasted through 1940. There were similar droughts in the 1950s and 1970s, but no comparable level of wind erosion. We explain why. The prevalence of small farms in the 1930s limited private solutions for controlling the downwind externalities associated with wind erosion. Drifting sand from unprotected fields damaged neighboring farms. Small farmers cultivated more of their land and were less likely to invest in erosion control than larger farmers. Soil conservation districts, established by the government after 1937, helped coordinate erosion control. This “unitized” solution for collective action is similar to that used in other natural resource/environmental settings.

This paper studies the time-series behavior of asset returns and aggregate consumption. Using a representative consumer model and imposing restrictions on preferences and the joint distribution of consumption and returns, we deduce a restricted log-linear time-series representation. Preference parameters for the representative agent are estimated and the implied restrictions are tested using postwar data.

This paper examines the hypothesis that the expected rate of return to speculation in the forward foreign exchange market is zero; that is, the logarithm of the forward exchange rate is the market's conditional expectation of the logarithm of the future spot rate. A new computationally tractable econometric methodology for examining restrictions on a k-step-ahead forecasting equation is employed. Using data sampled more finely than the forecast interval, we are able to reject the simple market efficiency hypothesis for exchange rates from the 1970s and the 1920s. For the modern experience, the tests are also inconsistent with several alternative hypotheses which typically characterize the relationship between spot and forward exchange rates.

Reviews the book "Expert Systems in Accounting," by Alex Edwards and N.A.D. Connell.

Reviews the book "Accounting Information Systems: A Book of Readings With Cases," edited by James A. Davis and Barry E. Cushing.

We update the evidence on changes in job stability through the mid‐1990s, using recently released Current Population Survey data for 1995 that parallel earlier job tenure supplements. In the aggregate, job stability declined modestly in the first half of the 1990s. Moreover, the relatively small aggregate changes mask rather sharp declines in stability for workers with more than a few years of tenure. Nonetheless, the data available to this point do not support the conclusion that the downward shift in job stability for more tenured workers, and the more modest decline in aggregate job stability, reflect long‐term trends.

There now exists a host of results concerning the revenue performance of various auction methods. This note delves deeper into auction markets by examining the effects on sellers' revenue of certain noncash means of payment. The basic result-that bidding mediums which include some contingent pricing feature generally yield the seller more revenue than do cash bids-is intriguing by itself and also points out the limitations of received theory. Since what follows builds on the independent-preferences framework, it is useful to first note the assumptions of that model and the major results pertaining to it. To model an auction in the independent-preferences tradition, one assumes that bidders have reservation values, Vi, that are known only privately and that can be depicted as being drawn independently from some distribution F( V). The most important result for this model is the revenue equivalence theorem: as given in John Riley and William Samuelson (1981), any auction involving risk-neutral bidders for which the following four conditions hold: (a) a buyer can make any bid above some minimum reserve price, (b) the buyer making the highest bid is awarded the object, (c) the auction rules are anonymous, and (d) there is a common equilibrium bidding strategy in which each buyer makes a bid bi, which is a strictly increasing function of his reservation value Vi, yields an expected revenue of