A structural econometric model of retirement of dual-career couples is specified and estimated with panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women. A coincidence of spouses retiring together, despite the younger ages of wives, suggests explicit efforts at coordination. The estimates suggest that one reason is a correlation of tastes for leisure. More important, each spouse, and perhaps husbands in particular, values retirement more once their spouse has retired. The opportunity set accounts for peaks in the retirement hazards of each spouse individually, but not for peaks in the simultaneous retirement of both spouses. Copyright 2000 by University of Chicago Press.

This article examines the effect of asymmetric information on the trading of underwriting risk between insurers and reinsurers and how it is mitigated in a context of long-term relationships. It begins by explaining how information problems affect the efficiency of the allocation of risk between insurers and reinsurers and how long-term implicit contracts allow the inclusion of new information in the pricing of reinsurance coverage. A key feature of these relationships is the reliance on loss-contingent rebates and commissions in the pricing of reinsurance coverage. We argue that when information is revealed only over time, long-term implicit contracts between insurers and reinsurers allow the inclusion of new information into reinsurance pricing. Because of this feature, the allocation of risk between insurers and reinsurers is more efficient. Specifically, such arrangements lead to more reinsurance coverage, higher insurer profits, and lower expected distress in the industry. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G22, G13, L15, D81.

Valuation, Intangible assets, Components of Goodwill, Acquisitions

I investigate how the relationship between the wage and the length of the work day has changed since the 1890s among prime‐aged men and women. I find that across wage deciles, within wage deciles, and within industry and occupation groups, the most highly paid worked fewer hours than the lowest paid in the 1890s but that by 1973 differences in hours worked were small and by 1991 the highest paid worked the longest day. I examine several explanations for the compression in the length of the work day and investigate the implications of hours inequality for earnings inequality.

There is a long-standing trade-off in bioculture between concentrating on high-yield varieties and maintaining sufficient diversity to lower the risks of catastrophic infection. The paper uses a simple ecology-based model of endogenous disease to indicate how a local decision to plant more of a widely grown crop creates negative externalities by increasing the probability that new pathogens will evolve to attack the crop globally. Society's basic issue concerns where to locate on an efficiency frontier between economic profitability and a standard formula for ecological entropy-proved here to be a rigorous measure of “generalized resistance” to crop-ecosystem failure.

Auditing, Competition, Audit quality, Auditor performance