We study the effects of electoral institutions on the size and composition of public expenditure in OECD and Latin American countries. We emphasize the distinction between purchases of goods and services, which are easier to target geographically, and transfers, which are easier to target across social groups. We present a theoretical model in which voters anticipating government policymaking under different electoral systems have an incentive to elect representatives more prone to transfer (public good) spending in proportional (majoritarian) systems. The model also predicts higher total primary spending in proportional (majoritarian) systems when the share of transfer spending is high (low). After defining rigorous measures of proportionality to be used in the empirical investigation, we find considerable support for our predictions.

We show that a framework that integrates job assignment, human-capital acquisition, and learning captures several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms, including the following. First, real-wage decreases are not rare but demotions are. Second, wage increases are serially correlated. Third, promotions are associated with large wage increases. Fourth, wage increases at promotion are small relative to the difference between average wages across levels of the job ladder. Fifth, workers who receive large wage increases early in their stay at one level of the job ladder are promoted quickly to the next.

Обсуждаются следующие темы: чистая теория производства, функциональное распределение дохода, технический прогресс, источники международных конкурентных преимуществ. Анализируются эластичность замещения между трудом и капиталом в обрабатывающей промышленности; производственные функции различного типа.

We study whether the repricing of employee stock options is in the best interests of common shareholders by examining the excess stock returns associated with timely, noncontamin‐ated repricing announcements made by Canadian firms. On the basis of three theories of why firms reprice, we develop competing predictions about the mean announcement‐date excess stock return and the cross‐sectional relations among excess stock returns, the estimated probability of repricing, and proxies for predictions from each theory. For a sample of 72 noncontaminated repricing announcements made by Canadian firms between November 1994 and July 2001, we find a reliably positive three‐day announcement‐date mean excess return of 4.9 percent. The results of our cross‐sectional analyses suggest that the market responds favorably to repricings because they assist in retaining key employees even though, at the margin, they enable managers to extract rents from shareholders. We do not find sufficient statistically significant evidence to reliably conclude that repricings are done to realign employee incentives.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the parameters of household preferences that determine the allocation of goods within the period and over the life cycle, using micro data. In doing so we are able to identify important effects of demographics, labour market status and other household characteristics on the intertemporal allocation of expenditure. We test the validity of the life-cycle model using excess sensitivity tests and find that controlling for demographics and labour market status variables can largely explain the excess sensitivity of consumption to anticipated changes in income.

We take up Cochrane’s (2011) challenge to identify the firm characteristics that provide independent information about average U.S. monthly stock returns by simultaneously including 94 characteristics in Fama-MacBeth regressions that avoid overweighting microcaps and adjust for data-snooping bias. We find that while 12 characteristics are reliably independent determinants in non-microcap stocks from 1980 to 2014 as a whole, return predictability sharply fell in 2003 such that just two characteristics have been independent determinants since then. Outside of microcaps, the hedge returns to exploiting characteristics-based predictability also have been insignificantly different from zero since 2003. Received January 28, 2015; editorial decision November 28, 2016 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.