Gains and losses reported as other comprehensive income (OCI) and as special items (SI) are often viewed as similar in nature: transitory items with little ability to predict future cash flows and minimal implications for company value. However, current accounting standards require SI gains and losses to be recognized in net income, while OCI gains and losses are deferred until realized. This study empirically compares OCI and SI gains and losses using a model that jointly estimates value relevance, predictive value, and persistence. Results show that both SI and OCI gains and losses are value-relevant, but SI gains and losses exhibit zero persistence (i.e., are transitory), while OCI gains and losses exhibit negative persistence (i.e., partially reverse over time). Further, we find that SI gains and losses have strong predictive value for forecasting both future net income and future cash flows, while OCI gains and losses have weaker predictive value. Data Availability: All data are publicly available from sources indicated in the text.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of employer-provided health insurance, Medicare, and Social Security on retirement behavior. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate a dynamic programming model of retirement that accounts for both saving and uncertain medical expenses. Our results suggest that Medicare is important for understanding retirement behavior, and that uncertainty and saving are both important for understanding the labor supply responses to Medicare. Half the value placed by a typical worker on his employer-provided health insurance is the value of reduced medical expense risk. Raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 leads individuals to work an additional 0.074 years over ages 60–69. In comparison, eliminating 2 years worth of Social Security benefits increases years of work by 0.076 years.

[We use a sample of 8,163 venture-backed companies over three decades to test the competing hypotheses that levels and relative shares of IPO (initial public offering) and M&A (mergers and acquisitions) exits are affected by market timing, versus pseudo-market timing that reflects market conditions. We find evidence of pseudo-market timing. Venture-backed issuers react to market or sector runups but do not predict downturns. We find no evidence that firm-specific market timing contributes to IPO or M&A waves. We also find that acquirers turn to acquisition when other opportunities are unattractive, and that the market may be slow to recognize that such opportunities are declining.]

We examine how two distinct ownership forms of concentrated control affect executive compensation. We compare executive compensation in dual class firms with that in single class companies with concentrated control. Although both samples of companies have agency problems associated with concentrated control, dual class companies have additional problems associated with controlling shareholders holding smaller equity positions. We show that family members in executive positions in dual class companies are paid significantly more than those of single class companies with concentrated control. The excess is in the form of more incentive compensation (bonuses and stock options). This finding is consistent with optimal contract theory of executive compensation in that the higher compensation is given to prevent dual class executives from taking advantage of their higher voting leverage. Our results are robust to an alternative specification of voting leverage which uses the difference between voting and cash flow rights of controlling shareholders.

We use a sample of 8, 163 venture-backed companies over three decades to test the competing hypotheses that levels and relative shares of IPO (initial public offering) and M&A (mergers and acquisitions) exits are affected by market timing, versus pseudo-market timing that reflects market conditions. We find evidence of pseudo-market timing. Venture-backed issuers react to market or sector runups but do not predict downturns. We find no evidence that firm-specific market timing contributes to IPO or M&A waves. We also find that acquirers turn to acquisition when other opportunities are unattractive, and that the market may be slow to recognize that such opportunities are declining. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

We analyze the puzzling behavior of the volatility of individual stock returns over the past few decades. The literature has provided many different explanations to the trend in volatility and this paper tests the viability of the different explanations. Virtually all current theoretical arguments that are provided for the trend in the average level of volatility over time lend themselves to explanations about the difference in volatility levels between firms in the cross-section. We therefore focus separately on the cross-sectional and time-series explanatory power of the different proxies. We fail to find a proxy that is able to explain both dimensions well. In particular, we find that Cao et al. [Cao, C., Simin, T.T., Zhao, J., 2008. Can growth options explain the trend in idiosyncratic risk? Review of Financial Studies 21, 2599–2633] market-to-book ratio tracks average volatility levels well, but has no cross-sectional explanatory power. On the other hand, the low-price proxy suggested by Brandt et al. [Brandt, M.W., Brav, A., Graham, J.R., Kumar, A., 2010. The idiosyncratic volatility puzzle: time trend or speculative episodes. Review of Financial Studies 23, 863–899] has much cross-sectional explanatory power, but has virtually no time-series explanatory power. We also find that the different proxies do not explain the trend in volatility in the period prior to 1995 (R-squared of virtually zero), but explain rather well the trend in volatility at the turn of the Millennium (1995–2005).

U.S. federal law calls for an end to overfishing, but measuring overfishing requires knowledge of bioeconomic parameters. Using microlevel economic data from the commercial fishery, this paper proposes a two-stage approach to estimate these parameters for a generalized fishery model. In the first stage, a fishery production function is consistently estimated by a within-period estimator treating the latent stock as a fixed effect. The estimated stock is then substituted into an equation of fish stock dynamics to estimate all other biological parameters. The bootstrap approach is used to correct the standard errors in the two-stage model. This method is applied to the reef-fish fishery in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. The traditional method, which uses catch-per-unit-effort as a stock proxy, significantly overstates the optimal harvest level.

We study firms' pension prefunding and portfolio allocation choices in a model in which firms trade off the need to compensate workers for the financial risk in their pension benefit against the cost advantage that may be gained by exploiting underpriced pension insurance. In the absence of pension insurance, the firm minimizes costs by rendering promised benefits free of risk to workers, who are assumed to be unable to hedge firm-specific risk. Various forms of government intervention, such as benefit guarantees, can alter this outcome dramatically by providing the firm with an incentive to shift risk to other parties. In this case, we find that the firm's decisions depend on, among other influences, the degree of insurance mispricing, the amount of guaranteed benefits, the stringency of minimum funding requirements, and the costs of financial distress.