This paper tests the Value Additivity Principle (VAP) of financial assets with the pricing of Standard Oil securities in 1912. The results are somewhat mixed: the VAP does not generally describe the daily prices of equivalent Standard Oil portfolios, but it accurately describes their average market values; and the portfolio values display convergent adjustment behavior that tends to equalize them quite rapidly. On balance, these findings are consistent with the VAP.

According to the family utility function approach, the labor supply functions of married men should differ according to whether their wives also work. In this paper, I explicitly model the switching nature of labor supply while also accounting for the endogeneity of the labor force participation decision of the wife, using an endogenous switching regressions model based on the quadratic family utility function. The model is estimated from a cross section of 1,210 married couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

While factors such as inflation, technological change and growth often have been discussed in connection with the adequacy of provisions for depreciation under a historical cost model, there is another dimension to the capital maintenance problem and it concerns the multiplier effect of depreciation. When an amount equal to depreciation is reinvested, a firm's productive capacity tends to increase. Reinvestment of depreciation also increases a firm's financial capital if book depreciation is more accelerated than economic depreciation. Based on a model developed by Ijiri (1967), this paper derives an index of this growth due to depreciation. The index estimates a bias in conventional depreciation methods that has been overlooked in the literature on the subject. This bias has implications for inflation accounting because if conventional depreciation methods have a built‐in growth bias, adjustments for inflation may be a type of double counting. A second implication mentioned concerns the bias in accounting rates of return. Résumé. Bien que des facteurs tels l'inflation, les changements technologiques et la croissance ont souvent été examinés à propos de la pertinence des provisions pour dépréciation dans le cadre du modèle au coût historique, un autre aspect du problème de préservation du capital subsiste et il concerne l'effet multiplicateur de l'amortissement. Lorsqu'un montant égal à l'amortissement est réinvesti, la capacité d'exploitation de la firme a tendance à s'accroître. Le réinvestissement de l'amortissement fait aussi augmenter le capital de la firme si l'amortissement comptable est plus accéléré que la dépréciation économique. En se basant sur un modèle élaboré par Ijiri (1967), cet article dérive un indice de cette croissance attribuable à l'amortissement. L'indice estime un biais des méthodes traditionnelles, qui a été négligé dans les recherches consacrées au sujet. Ce biais a des implications en comptabilité des effets de l'inflation, car si les méthodes d'amortissement traditionnelles comportent implicitement ce biais de croissance, les redressements relatifs à l'inflation peuvent être assimilés à un double comptage. Une deuxième conséquence est signalée, soit le biais relatif aux taux de rendement comptable.

This paper sets up a general equilibrium model of a world of heterogeneous jobs and heterogeneous tastes, and uses the model to (i) analyze the effects of employer discrimination and (ii) predict the likely consequences of requiring "equal pay for jobs of comparable worth." It shows that employment of both women and men is likely to fall as a result of comparable worth. It also shows that when individuals' tastes are heterogeneous, neither comparable worth nor the simple model of compensating differentials on which it is based provides useful insights into wage determination. In particular, when tastes are heterogeneous, there is no reason to expect equal pay for jobs of "comparable worth" even in the absence of employer discrimination.

This paper analyzes the implications for turnover of costly job-specific training. The presence of such costs in a search model implies that turnover decisions reduce the value of potential trades that are available to other market participants. There is too much turnover because of this external effect, and, therefore, too much retraining. When the investment in job training is endogenous, inefficient turnover again occurs, and the investment in specific skills is inefficiently high. The interactions between skill acquisition and turnover imply that it is essentially impossible for a brokerage institution to achieve efficiency.

Several hypotheses concerning pension funding strategy are tested in a cross-sectional regression model on a sample of 255 firms. Results are consistent with the following explanations: (1) finance incentives (tax benefits and financial slack) for high-level funding, (2) labor incentives for low-level funding, and (3) financial statement incentives relating to political costs for high-level funding and debt contracting costs for low-level funding. Pension funding strategy appears to be complex, involving tradeoffs between funding incentives. The nature of these interactions and tradeoffs remains to be clarified through future research.

We derive lower bounds on the asymptotic variances for regular distribution-free estimators of the parameters of the binary choice model and the censored regression (Tobit) model. A distribution-free (or semiparametric) estimator is one that does not require any assumption about the distribution of the stochastic error term in the model, apart from regularity conditions. For the binary choice model, we obtain an explicit lower bound for the asymptotic variance for the slope parameters, or more generally the parameters of a nonlinear regression function in the underlying latent variable model, but we find that there is no regular semiparametric estimator of the constant term (identified by requiring the error distribution to have zero median). Lower bounds are also obtained under the further assumption that the error distribution is symmetric, and in this case there is a finite lower bound for the constant term too. Comparison of the bounds with those for the classical parametric problem shows the loss of information due to lack of a priori knowledge of the functional form of the error distribution. We give the conditions for equality of the parametric and semiparametric lower bounds (in which case adaptive estimation may be possible), both with and without the assumption of a symmetric error distribution. In general, adaptive estimation is not possible, but one special case where these conditions hold is when the regression function is linear and the explanatory variables have a multivariate normal distribution. The Tobit model considered here is the censored nonlinear regression model, with a fixed censoring point. We again give an explicit lower bound for the asymptotic variance for the regression parameters, this time including a constant term (if the error term has zero median). Comparison with the corresponding lower bound for the parametric case shows that adaptive estimation is in general not possible for this model.

ABS'DtAC'l'For a country such as Bangladesh, a nested multinomial logit model is utilized to test whether female time allocation is inflexibly fixed by local customs and whether informal activity is an independent category in a woman's choice structure of work.The econometric analysis of cross-sectional women's time-use data from rural Bangladesh suggests that a woman's activity as an unpaid labor in a family enterprise is not a distinct category in her choice structure of work.The results support the alternative hypothesis, however, that women's time-use patterns are not exclusively fixed by the society, but are partially influenced by individual-, household-, and community-level economic constraints.