This article formulates a general equilibrium model for analyzing the youth labor market. At the heart of the model is an interplay between a labor force with heterogeneous ability levels and a minimum wage restriction. Ability affects performance on skilled jobs and, to a lesser extent, on unskilled jobs. Workers are less productive as youths than as adults. The model is applied to rationalize several results from available studies and to analyze the effects of three representative policies: a youth subminimum wage, subsidies paid to firms that hire youths, and subsidies that offset the costs of on-the-job training.

Auditing, Decision making, Frequency judgements, Internal control evaluations

A canonical price-normalized form is proposed as a generalization of the ordinary consumer's surplus expression commonly used to evaluate changes in economic welfare. This familiar-looking formula, it is proved, can be rigorously interpreted as representing the first- and second-order terms of a Taylor-series expansion for the equivalent-variation or willingness-to-pay function of a single consumer. In principle, the lowly consumer's surplus triangle-and-rectangle methodology can be rigorously defended as an exact approximation to a theoretically meaningful measure as long as prices are appropriately deflated. The appropriate price deflator is derived, and some implications are discussed.

This paper extends financial option theory by developing a methodology for the valuation of claims on a real asset: an offshore petroleum lease. Several theoretical and practical problems, not present in applying option pricing theory to financial assets, are addressed. Most importantly, we show the necessity of combining option pricing techniques with a model of equilibrium in the market for the underlying asset (petroleum reserves). The advantages of this approach over conventional discounted cash flow techniques are emphasized. The methodological development provides important insights for both company behavior and government policy. Promising empirical results are reported.

Joseph P. Ogden, Alan L. Tucker, The Relative Valuation of American Currency Spot and Futures Options: Theory and Empirical Tests, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 351-368

[While most takeover models assume atomistic stockholders, we analyze a single-raider model with finitely many stockholders. Because the raider can always make some stockholders pivotal, he can overcome the free-rider problem identified by Grossman and Hart (1980) and others in atomistic-stockholder models and profitably take over even without exclusion. One might expect that it would be harder for the raider to make stockholders of more widely held firms pivotal and that exclusion would thus become necessary; however, the infinite-stockholder game cannot yield this conclusion. We also consider the limit of the finite-stockholder game and give conditions under which exclusion is unnecessary. Finally, we show that exclusion leads to the possibility of inefficient takeovers.]

Abstract Reviews the book "Accounting for the Translation of Foreign Currencies: The Effects of Statement 52 on Equity Analysts," by Paul A. Griffin and Richard P. Castanias.

Alan L. Tucker, Lallon Pond, The Probability Distribution of Foreign Exchange Price Changes: Tests of Candidate Processes, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Nov., 1988), pp. 638-647

Abstract The research reported here investigates the effects of information choice and information use on the quality of municipal financial analysts' predictions concerning changes in the general obligation bond ratings of cities. Analysts were given a menu from which they chose information; a statistical model of bond rating changes was constructed using the same information. Analysts predicted bond rating changes using either their self-selected information or information selected by the statistical model. Although previous research concluded that information choice was the main factor in humans' sub-optimal prediction achievement, the results in this study show that humans performed about as well as statistical models in a validation sample. Previous research was reinterpreted in light of the current results.