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The Effect of Size of Manufacturing Corporation on the Distribution of the Rate of Return

The Review of Economics and Statistics 1949 31(3), 229
STUDIES based principally on aggregations of income tax returns or SEC registration statements have established the pattern of variation of the average rate of corporate profit according to size of corporation.' It is proposed in this paper to review and interpret the evidence of these aggregations and to explore the additional information that may be obtained from study of the entire distribution of the rates of return, rather than of averages alone. The effect of a tendency of profitable corporations to conceal profits by paying large salaries to management will also be investigated. From this investigation we may conclude that small corporations have greater variability of profits than do large, in two different senses. For any given year the dispersion of profit rate is much greater among small corporations than among large. From bad times to good the profit rates of small and medium sized corporations fluctuate more than do those of large ones. Finally, the small corporations probably misclassify a greater part of their profits as salaries of management, than do large corporations. As a consequence the generalization that might have been inferred from the experience of the thirties, that small corporations earn lower rates of return than do large corporations, is not very reliable, even for the year I937. VARIATION OF AVERAGE RATE OF RETURN WITH SIZE

Testing for Salience Effects in Choices under Risk

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2025 107(3), 741-754
We construct and run an experiment to test the most basic choice effect predicted by salience theory. Subjects allocate wealth between a risky and a safe investment. While we vary an apparent payoff ratio to influence salience, treatments have economically equivalent consequences. Most other theories of behavior then predict zero effect. Our experimental findings are strongly consistent with the behavioral implication of a continuous version of salience theory. We provide a novel structural estimate on the strength of salience. In our setting, increasing the relative payoff contrast by 1% is equivalent to an increased odds ratio by about 0.4%.