Since the early 1980's, patterns of emergingmarket finance have changed significantly. Greater integration of capital markets and a trend toward a greater use of direct lending through bonds has led to relatively decreased use of indirect finance through syndicated bank loans. These changes have produced benefits to investors through opportunities for risk diversification and to emerging-market sovereign borrowers by increasing the investor base. The broadened investor base in bond financing, however, raises problems of coordination and collective action in the event of a sovereign borrower's default and restructuring. Now, three parties are involved in determining the debt markdown required to produce solvency: the debtor, creditors, and the global taxpayer through international financial institutions (IFI's). The complex relationships among the borrowers, creditors, and the global taxpayer have made restructuring obligations a costly and time-consuming exercise, especially with the possibility of holdouts. Both the sovereign borrower and its creditors have an incentive to avoid a restructuring in the hope of financial assistance from the global taxpayer. Sovereign governments may not undertake the politically painful steps involved in beginning a restructuring when there is always the hope that official assistance will be forthcoming. Creditors may not accept a reduction in the value of their claims, also in the hope that official assistance will be forthcoming. Costs of postponed and disorderly restructurings are real and substantial. Delays in restructuring can drain a country's resources and increase the ultimate costs of restoring financial sustainability. Creditors bear a burden as well, because the losses associated with the restructuring are reflected in values of

Forms of Intolerance held in early September 2001 was unfortunately obscured by the tragic events of September 11. Nonetheless, the event reflects global recognition of problems of racial, ethnic and cultural discrimination, oppression and exploitation. The following analysis, inspired by participation in collaborative international research presented to the Conference, suggests that economic discrimination may be usefully seen in terms of rents and rent-seeking. By successfully discriminating against a particular group, employers or consumers succeed in extracting rents from the group discriminate against. However, such rents are different in nature. Discriminated employees (e.g. Blacks) receive lower remuneration or inferior terms of employment. Successful discrimination allows employers to use their availability to extract additional ‘producer surplus ’ by conceding lower (‘intermediate’-level) wages or employment conditions to ostensibly privileged employees (e.g. Whites), than might be the case in the absence of discrimination. Even if there is an eventual equalization of wage rates or employment conditions between the group discriminated against and the privileged group, a ‘producer surplus ’ from the poorer wages or employment conditions may well persist

This paper argues that long-run trends in geographic segregation are inconsistent with models where residential choice depends solely on local public goods (the Tiebout hypothesis). We develop an extension of the Tiebout model that predicts as mobility costs fall, the heterogeneity across communities of individual public good preferences and of public good provision must (weakly) increase. Given the secular decline in mobility costs, these predictions can be evaluated using historical data. We find decreasing heterogeneity in policies and proxies for preferences across (i) a sample of U.S. municipalities (1870–1990); (ii) all Boston-area municipalities (1870–1990); and (iii) all U.S. counties (1850–1990).

The economics of hunting and gathering must have driven the biological evolution of human characteristics, since hunter-gatherer societies prevailed for the two million years of human history. These societies feature huge intergenerational resource flows, suggesting that these resource flows should replace fertility as the key demographic consideration. It is then theoretically expected that life expectancy and brain size would increase simultaneously, as apparently occurred during our evolutionary history. The brain here is considered as a direct form of bodily investment, but also crucially as facilitating further indirect investment by means of learning-by-doing.

Employee stock options (ESO’s) are a ubiquitous form of compensation in corporate America. By the late 1990’s, ESO’s outstanding at large corporations averaged 7 percent of total outstanding shares, with top executives holding approximately one-third of total ESO’s (John Core and Guay, 2001). Empirical evidence suggests that firms use ESO’s to align employees’ and shareholders’ interests, attract and retain employees, and compensate employees for their labor while simultaneously raising capital from employees (Core and Guay, 1999, 2001; Kevin J. Murphy, 1999). There is currently an intense debate nationally and internationally among standard-setters, politicians, investors, corporate executives, and academics about whether to require corporations to deduct the estimated value of ESO grants as a business expense in reported income. Existing accounting standards require firms to expense most forms of pay, such as salaries, cash bonuses, and the value of stock grants, but allow firms to choose whether to expense the value of ESO grants. Until very recently, nearly all firms chose not to expense ESO’s. However, firms that do not expense ESO’s must publicly disclose in the financial statement footnotes what reported income would have been if the ESO’s were expensed. In a recent sample of large growth firms, Christine Botosan and Marlene Plumlee (2001) find that mandatory expensing of ESO’s would have resulted in a 14-percent median reduction in firms’ earnings per share. Firms are also required to disclose details of top-executive ESO compensation in the annual proxy statement. Underlying the ESO debate is the concern that the choice among alternative financialaccounting treatments have real economic consequences. A large literature beginning with Ross Watts and Jerold Zimmerman (1978) provides evidence that accounting choice can impose economic costs on firms when contracts (e.g., debt and executive compensation contracts) or influential external parties (e.g., tax authorities) rely on reported accounting numbers (see Thomas Fields et al. [2001] for a survey of this literature). Accounting choice can also have economic consequences if investors fixate on particular numbers, such as reported earnings, resulting in security mispricing and misallocation of capital. Proponents of mandatory expensing argue that ESO’s reflect a cost of acquiring employee labor, and that expensing ESO’s conveys this information to outsiders consistently with other labor costs. Some argue that the absence of ESO expense results in stock mispricings, because investors fixate on reported earnings and fail to understand or utilize supplemental footnote disclosures about the true economic cost of ESO grants. Others argue that, when investors and boards of directors fixate on accounting earnings, the absence of ESO expense exacerbates ineffective corporate governance and allows management to use ESO’s to extract excessive compensation. Proponents of this view argue that expensing ESO’s will reign in management compensation by putting it under a brighter light. Opponents of expensing ESO’s argue that deducting the cost of ESO’s from earnings conveys an impression of weaker financial results to investors and, under the assumption that investors fixate on reported earnings, could raise the firms’ cost of financing and stifle corporate investment and innovation. There is also a concern that external parties, such as taxing authorities, might use changes in financial-accounting treatment as a cue to alter regulatory and tax policy.

Organizational Design and Technology Choice under Intrafirm Bargaining: Comment by Catherine C. de Fontenay and Joshua S. Gans. Published in volume 93, issue 1, pages 448-455 of American Economic Review, March 2003

How Does Globalization Affect the Synchronization of Business Cycles? by M. Ayhan Kose, Eswar S. Prasad and Marco E. Terrones. Published in volume 93, issue 2, pages 57-62 of American Economic Review, May 2003

Global aging is prompting workers and taxpayers everywhere to recognize their vulnerability to the inherent uncertainty of unfunded social-security systems. This has generated an international wave of social-security reforms over the last two decades, prompting more than 20 countries to establish Individual Account (IA) plans. In the United States, the idea of Individual Accounts has attracted recent interest with the release of the Final Report of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security (CSSS): here, voluntary individual accounts were proposed as a key element of a reformed national old-age system (see Commission to Strengthen Social Security, 2001; John F. Cogan and Mitchell, 2003). Strengths of IA's include the fact that participants gain ownership in their accounts and diversify their pension investments; nevertheless, IA participants also must bear capital-market risk. Recent market volatility has reminded investors of the importance of capital-market fluctuations and their potential impact on retirement income. In response, some policymakers have suggested that "guarantees" be designed to help protect IA investments. Abroad, such guarantees have been adopted in several Latin American countries undergoing reform, and most recently, in Japan and Germany (Mitchell and Kent Smetters, 2003). Sensible public policy recommending the adoption of guarantees must identify their costs and who will pay for them. In this paper, we discuss how to evaluate such costs in the context of a social-security reform that includes IA's, along with ways to finance them.