This paper investigates the value added by private information exchanges that share information on business payment performance. We discuss how this information is collected and disseminated by the world’s largest private information broker, Dun & Bradstreet. We provide the first empirical examination of the importance of this information at the lending decision level. Our findings indicate that exchange-generated information provides significant explanatory power in failure prediction models controlling for other credit information that is easily available to lenders. Our study complements the work of Jappelli and Pagano [Information sharing, lending and defaults; Cross country evidence, Centre for Economic Policy Research, Discussion Paper 2184, 1999] who find in cross-country macro level tests that information exchanges add value.

The impending elimination of mandatory retirement for tenured faculty on January 1, 1994 (Public Law 99-592, 1986), has raised the visibility of a number of questions about faculty retirement behavior. What are the factors that influence individual faculty members' retirement decisions? How important are financial and nonfinancial considerations? Why do faculty in private institutions work to a later age, on average, than their colleagues in public institutions? Are there other systematic (for example, genderor discipline-related) differences as well? This paper is an attempt to answer such questions about individual faculty retirement behavior. The paper utilizes data collected as part of a comprehensive national study that projected faculty retirements through the year 2003 for over 35,000 faculty at 101 doctoral research, comprehensive, and general baccalaureate institutions (see our 1990 paper). The discussion that follows uses data from that broader institutional survey and from a survey of 747 faculty members age 55 and over who had separated from this same set of 101 institutions. Among the information provided by the 518 usable responses were data on factors that influence faculty members' decisions regarding the appropriate time to retire.

This article investigates the assimilation role of intermarriage between immigrants and natives. Intermarried immigrants earn significantly higher incomes than endogamously married immigrants, even after we take account of human capital endowments and endogeneity of intermarriage. The premium does not appear to be a reward for unobservable individual characteristics. Natives who intermarry do not receive this premium, nor do immigrants who intermarry into another ethnic group. The premium is mainly attributable to a faster speed of assimilation rather than any difference in labor‐market quality between intermarried and nonintermarried immigrants at the point of arrival.

Since 1964 all the increase in female labor force participation in Australia can be attributed to married women. About 90% of the increase can be attributed to women employed part time. The paper argues that aggregate female participation rate equations cannot be regarded as labor supply curves. The female wage rate relative to that of males is exogenously determined by wage-fixing authorities above market-clearing rates, and the excess supply of labor is not adequately measured by the unemployment rate. Married women and part-time workers have a high propensity to bypass the unemployment pool when leaving or seeking a job. Participation equations are dominated by employment demand for sex-segregated jobs.