TOT THE LEAST of the problems involved in reviewing the economic history portions of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences [5, 1968] is that of determining which portions properly are economic history. Some items easily fall into that category, but many others having such headings as Economic Thought, Poverty, or Slavery frequently provide interesting material though their contents are largely peripheral. In order to keep this review within reasonable bounds, attention will be confined to items specifically classified by the editors as economic history, with only an occasional glance at tempting subjects technically off limits. Some comparisons with the earlier Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences [4, Seligman, 1930] which appeared more than thirty years ago are especially interesting. This earlier work will be referred to i what follows as the Encyclopaedia; the current one as the International Encyclopedia. In actual fact neither encyclopedia is international in any thorough-going sense. Both are written largely by, for, and about Western Europeans and North Americans. The editor of the original fifteen-volume Encyclopaedia made a courageous though not notably successful attempt to define the The tremendous expansion of the social sciences since that time has made the task of definition even more difficult. So the editor of the International Encyclopedia wisely gave up the attempt and merely indicates that the contents of the present work provide sufficient meaning for the term and the best indication of the expanded scope of the field. The heading does appear in the International Encyclopedia and a subtitle, the Philosophy of Science by Michael Scriven (Volume 14, Pp. 83-90), includes an excellent essay on the social sciences. His perceptive statement along with an unusually provactive one by Jack Hexter on the Rhetoric of History (6,368-94) might well be made required reading for all graduate economic history students. As is often true of general reference works, the reader may find most interesting some of the contributions lying outside the field of his own specialty. The editor makes clear that the International Encyclopedia is designed to supplement rather than to replace the earlier work. He also announces the plan to put special emphasis on method. Success in achieving these objectives, although considerable, varies from one subject to another. A general historical introduction, one of the major contributions of the older work, does not appear in the new one. Substantive historical coverage, especially for the years since 1930, is occasionally sketchy in the special topics. The new emphasis on method provides an attractive focus, though many sections and articles fall short of this intention. In its indexing of topics the International Encyclopedia reflects the uneasy position of

THE POSTHUMOUS DISTRIBUTION of two of Michal Kalecki's last works [3, 1969 and 4, 1971] offers an opportunity to draw attention to the career of one of Poland's most illustrious economic theorists. If Kalecki's formulation of a macroanalytic theory was overshadowed by Keynes in the mid-'thirties, he nonetheless went on to develop it and to make other contributions -both theoretical and applied. In the latter category was his participation in the establishment of the United Nations' World Economic Report. Kalecki's voluntary return to Poland was not uniformly beneficial to his career; there is, unfortunately, ample evidence that any official recognition of his brilliance was accompanied by an overt distrust of his revisionism. The calamities that befell the Polish economy in 1969-70 are ample proof that Kalecki had the rare distinction of being a prophet in his own country. He repeatedly warned Gomulka of the disastrous effects that his economic policy was likely to have. Although he was a Jew, Kalecki was not directly subject to the slanderous official antiSemitic campaigns launched after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. But he personally was greatly tormented by the inequities and the upsurge of forces of retrogression. In 1968 Professor Kalecki retired voluntarily in protest against the dismissal of many colleagues who fell victims to the wave of repression against alleged revisionists and Zionists. Another form of protest was his refusal to publish in his native country. Kalecki was greatly esteemed by the various groups of progressive economists in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. Also, in the West, he found many staunch admirers of his analytical powers and towering personal integrity. Yet his work has gained in neither East nor West the recognition that it merits. The reputation in the West of Michal Kalecki (who died in 1970) probably rests on his seminal contributions to (1) the theory of economic dynamics and distribution of income, (2) his anticipation and independent discovery of all the essential ingredients of the Keynesian system, (3) his prediction of the regime of the political business cycle, and (4) his development of the concept of general rationing, etc. His contributions to the development of a theory of economic growth and planning under socialism, and to the elaboration of a perspective plan, will probably gain a fifth and equal place in the history of economic thought-and will become just as important in influencing economic policy. (Historical parallels are difficult, however, and this is not the place to make conjectures on the likely impact of theories on policy.) These books bear witness to the clarity of his thinking as well as to the capacity of an adept translator to convey the beauty of his exposition. The study at hand on the socialist economy [3, 1969] reflects Kalecki's first hand knowledge of the realities of planning, the wealth of experience he accumulated as an adviser to the Polish and other governments, and the acuteness of a brilliant theoretical mind. A parallel could, perhaps, be drawn between the development of Kalecki's theory of growth in a socialist economy and the development of his business cycle theory (theory of economic dynamics of the capitalist economy); both were essentially derived from a perceptive observation of economic realities. Kalecki was always primarily interested in and preoccupied with the most urgent problems requiring solution. Kalecki stresses throughout that his work

This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to provide new evidence on the ability of a host of standard measures of illiquidity to detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I find that when information is short-lived, only absolute order imbalance and effective spread are statistically and economically robust predictors of illegal insider trading. However, when information is long-lasting, insiders strategically time their trades to avoid illiquidity, and none of the standard measures considered are reliable predictors, including bid-ask spreads, order imbalance, Kyle’s λ, and Amihud illiquidity. (JEL D53D82G12G14K42) Received: March 14, 2019; Editorial decision: February 18, 2020 by Editor Thierry Foucault.

Value premiums, which we define as value portfolio returns in excess of market portfolio returns, are on average much lower in the second half of the July 1963–June 2019 period. But the high volatility of monthly premiums prevents us from rejecting the hypothesis that expected premiums are the same in both halves of the sample. Regressions that forecast value premiums with book-to-market ratios in excess of market (BM–BMM) produce more reliable evidence of second-half declines in expected value premiums, but only if we assume the regression coefficients are constant during the sample period. Received: January 21, 2020; editorial decision: July 21, 2020; Editor: Jeffrey Pontiff.

We use bootstrap simulations to examine the properties of long-horizon U.S. stock market returns. We document the rate at which continuously compounded market returns converge toward normal distributions as we extend the horizon from 1 month to 30 years, and the rate at which dollar payoffs converge toward lognormal. We also verify that, though largely irrelevant at short horizons, uncertainty about the expected market return has a substantial impact on uncertainty about long-horizon payoffs.

We find that the degree of expected idiosyncratic skewness in seasoned equity issuers’ stock returns is an important determinant of flotation costs and subsequent abnormal stock performance. High skewness issuers incur significantly greater offer price discounts, particularly when institutional share allocation is largest, pay higher gross underwriting spreads, and exhibit poorer stock performance in the three years after issuance, all compared to low skewness issuers. These results suggest that skewness-induced overpricing increases the flotation costs of seasoned equity offers and leads to poor subsequent stock performance.

Does an increase in competition increase or decrease bank stability? I use a novel way to capture changes in banking competition by exploring how the exogenous state-specific process of banking deregulation gradually lowered entry barriers into urban banking markets. I find that the increase in market contestability significantly improves bank stability. This result is robust to the inclusion of additional fixed effects and other influences, such as mergers and acquisitions, or geographic expansion. Moreover, I find that greater competition reduces banks’ failure probability, share of non-performing loans and increases profitability. These findings suggest that competition increases stability, as it improves bank profitability and asset quality.

This paper studies the use of cash and credit for making transactions when there is asymmetric information in credit markets. For relatively low inflation rates, equilibria are of the pooling variety and low-credit-risk consumers signal their riskiness to lenders only indirectly by establishing a good track record in credit markets. For higher inflation rates there may exist a separating equilibrium in which low-credit-risk consumers directly signal their type to lenders by specializing in cash early in life and specializing in credit later in life. The greater the degree of adverse selection in credit markets, the wider the range of inflation rates for which a separating equilibrium exists. Credit usage is increasing in the inflation rate, but greater adverse selection may increase or decrease credit usage depending on the parameterization. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: E44.

German GAAP, US GAAP, 1965 Corporation Law, Accounting standards

Covariances between aggregate stock returns and changes in bond yields change sign over time. Existing theories emphasize either time-varying properties of expected inflation or time-varying properties of real yields. Using revisions in survey forecasts as proxies for macroeconomic news, neither approach succeeds empirically. Inflation-centric models require much more news about expected future inflation than we observe from surveys. Real-centric models posit signs of covariances among macroeconomic news, changes in yields, and stock returns that do not match those in the data. In a nutshell, macroeconomic news appears to drive a substantial part of stock–bond comovement, but not in ways consistent with our theories.