Turner Broadcasting illustrates how organizational mechanisms can be adapted to prevent a majority owner from imposing costs on minority shareholders through inept management or opportunistic behavior. These mechanisms involve issuing preferred stock with unusual features, concentrating its ownership among a small group of investors, allowing the new preferred shareholders to elect several directors, and requiring supramajority approval of major management decisions by a reconstituted board of directors. The alienability of the preferred stock is restricted to help insure that its ownership stays concentrated and in the hands of those with the specific knowledge and incentives to be effective monitors.

In a multivariate regression model relating individual returns to the market return, CAPM implies non-linear restrictions on the parameters. Several asymptotically valid tests of these restrictions have been suggested. The existing Monte Carlo evidence shows that some of these tests are unreliable for reasonable sample sizes, but does not indicate well which tests are reliable. This paper reports the results of an extensive Monte Carlo experiment. Shanken's CSR test and Jobson and Korkie's corrected likelihood ratio test are quite accurate in all cases we consider.

In this article we investigate the disincentive effects of shortening the potential duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We identify these disincentive effects by exploiting changes in Slovenia’s unemployment insurance system—a “natural experiment” that involved substantial reductions in the potential duration of benefits for four groups of workers plus no change in benefits for another group (which served as a natural control). We find that the change had a positive effect on the exit rate from unemployment—to new jobs and other options—for unemployment spells of various lengths and for several categories of unemployed workers.

We use data from the Canadian 2-year longitudinal Labour Market Activity Survey of 1986-87 to estimate the effect of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system on job duration. Particular attention is focused on the "entrance requirements" of the UI system, which relate eligibility for UI benefits to an individual's recent employment history. The article makes operational the UI entrance requirement provisions which take into account variations in the regional unemployment rate. Controlling for many personal and job characteristics, we find evidence that a significant number of jobs terminate when they have reached the duration that would permit a UI claim.

A model of unemployment duration is estimated with weekly micro data on Canadian men. Ent itlement provisions in the unemployment insurance program and demand conditions are found to have a significant effect on the probability of leaving unemployment. The probability of a worker leaving unemploy ment declines with the duration of unemployment, holding unemployment insurance entitlement constant. When entitlement is allowed to vary, the probability of leaving first falls and then generally rises with unemployment duration. These results are robust with respect to allo wing for person-specific unobserved heterogeneity and alternative spe cifications of duration dependence. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of how job search requirements under various government programs influence job search behavior. The analysis indicates that job search requirements exert a significant impact on certain aspects of the job search process, but not those that generally lead to a higher probability of employment. It is also found that persons who utilize intensively search activities that result in direct employer contact have much shorter durations of unemployment than persons who do not utilize such activities intensively. It is speculated that altering job search requirements to include more direct employer contact could lead to a significant reduction in unemployment.

Abstract Building on the work of Bernard and Thomas 1990, we develop a model to infer the degree to which the information in an earnings announcement is incorporated into investors' expectations for the subsequent earnings announcement at any point in time between the two announcements. We are unable to reject the null hypothesis that investors' earnings expectations are based on a seasonal random walk and reflect none of the implications of the immediately prior earnings announcement up to 15 trading days after that announcement. By mid‐quarter, expectations are significantly more sophisticated than a seasonal random walk. Two trading days before the next earnings announcement, as much as one half of the information in the prior earnings announcement is reflected in earnings expectations. We also find that the dissemination of information, albeit predictable information, speeds the incorporation of prior earnings information into earnings expectations. Our results suggest that as information about future earnings that could have been discerned from the earlier announcements (because past earnings surprises predict future ones) is disseminated in a more transparent form, investors revise their earnings expectations to reflect this information. Thus, the investors' expectations appear to incorporate more and more of the serial correlation in earnings surprises as the quarter progresses, even though they do not consider per se the serial correlation in earnings surprises in forming their expectations.

Abstract. A newly issued AICPA auditing standard focuses attention on analytical procedures. Regression analysis has been shown to be a useful audit tool and is used to a limited extent in practice. This study compares a univariate regression‐based decision rule with that of exponential smoothing. The effect on the regression‐based decision method when additional input information is included to develop a multivariate model is also evaluated. Comparisons are accomplished by seeding various error patterns into the audit period data and evaluating the results of the various models. The results indicate that the regression‐based decision model was at least as efficient and effective as the exponential smoothing‐based model. Additional input information into the univariate regression model to develop a multivariate model did improve auditor decisions for some types of accounts but did not significantly affect the number of incorrect rejections and/or acceptances for other types. The multivariate model did improve the achieved precision of the univariate model but still did not reach desired levels. Résumé. Dans un Auditing Standards Procedures qu'il publiait récemment, l'AICPA se penche sur les procédés analytiques. L'analyse de régression s'est révélée un instrument de vérification utile et son emploi dans la pratique est modéré, Les auteurs comparent une règle de décision fondée sur une régression comportant une seule variable aléatoire avec celle du lissage exponentiel. L'incidence d'un supplément d'information à l'entrée sur la méthode de décision fondée sur la régression permet de mettre au point un modèle à plusieurs variables aléatoires, que les auteurs évaluent également. Les comparaisons sont réalisées en introduisant divers scénarios d'erreur dans les données de la période soumise à la vérification. Les résultats de l'étude indiquent que le modèle de décision fondé sur la régression est au moins aussi efficient et efficace que le modèle fondé sur le lissage exponentiel. L'introduction d'un supplément d'information dans le modèle de régression à une seule variable aléatoire de manière à créer un modèle à plusieurs variables aléatoires a de fait amélioré les décisions du vérificateur pour certains types de comptes, mais n'a pas eu d'incidence significative sur le nombre d'erreurs de première et de seconde espèces pour d'autres types de comptes. La performance du modèle à plusieurs variables aléatoires est de fait supérieure à celle du modèle à une seule variable aléatoire, sans toutefois permettre d'obtenir les niveaux de précision souhaités.

We estimate the longer-run effects of attending an effective high school (one that improves a combination of test scores, survey measures of socioemotional development, and behaviors in ninth grade) for students who are more versus less educationally advantaged. All students benefit from attending effective schools, but the least advantaged students experience larger improvements in high school graduation, college going, and school-based arrests. Test score value-added understates the long-run importance of effective schools, particularly for less advantaged populations. Patterns suggest that this may, in part, reflect less advantaged students being relatively more responsive to non-test-score dimensions of school quality.

Abstract We examine Twitter discussion of sell-side analysts’ stock recommendation revisions. While many investors lack direct access to analyst research, we observe revision-related Twitter discussion associated with approximately 90 percent of the revisions in our sample, usually within three hours of their announcement. Revision-related Twitter discussion is greater for upgrades and for analysts from larger brokerages. Examining within-revision intraday price discovery, we observe increased price discovery during intraday windows with more revision-related tweets, especially for tweets that have more user engagement, are posted by more influential authors, or involve stocks with more intense retail trading volume. We find that revision-related retail trading is more intense and better predicts future returns for revisions with more revision-related Twitter discussion. We observe no such evidence for institutional investors who have direct access to sell-side research. Our results suggest that Twitter is an important channel in facilitating price discovery following analyst revisions, particularly among retail investors.