Exports require significant up-front costs in product design, marketing, and distribution. These are intangible, firm-specific investments that are likely difficult to finance externally. We argue that a developed financial system can therefore facilitate exports. We test this prediction and find support for it. First, financial development is associated with more exports in industries in which fixed costs are high as well as to importers that require high costs. Second, trade dynamics are affected by financial development. In countries with better finance, exports are more sensitive to exchange rates. Finally, we predict and document that countries with more developed finance experience more volatile exports. (JEL F14, F36, G20, G30)

Previous estimates of the effects of the Seattle and Denver income maintenance experiments on labor supply indicate that persons eligible for experimental payments reduced their work effort by appreciable amounts. However, these estimates have all been based on data that were self-reported during interviews by participants in the experiment. This paper investigates whether the estimates are biased by differences between treatment and control groups in reporting accuracy. Our results, which utilize employer-reported information on participants' work effort, suggest that the experiment's effects on several categories of Seattle and Denver participants were less adverse than estimates based on self-reported interview data imply.

This article examines past evaluations of government training programs for the economically disadvantaged and offers an agenda for future research. It is found that government training programs are producing modest increases in earnings for adult men and women, but are probably not producing positive effects for youth. Future research must better document links between program-provided training and acquisition of valuable skills and must explore potential returns from increased scale. The recent adoption of random assignment has improved the accuracy of field evaluations but would benefit from an economic theory of evaluation to guide research into increasing training effectiveness.

The task is an analysis of the traditional labor supply model using several competing methodologies. The approach is a step-by-step exploration of alternative labor supply estimating equations that attempts to identify the independent (marginal) effect of each particular change in the form of these equations. By systematically exploring what difference each of these changes makes to the parameter estimates, one can isolate which factors strongly affect estimated response parameters. Results from existing research can then be evaluated within a larger context, and future research can concentrate on resolving those methodological issues that do make a difference.

David Greenberg, Robert Moffitt, John Friedmann, Underreporting and Experimental Effects on Work Effort: Evidence from the Gary Income Maintenance Experiment, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Nov., 1981), pp. 581-589