We estimate the effect of endogenous training participation on transitions in and out of employment for disadvantaged women in the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) study. Decomposing the effect of training on employment into its effects on transitions in and out of employment has the potential to develop more effective programs. We also consider a potentially serious identification problem that arises when individuals do not undertake training immediately, and we propose a test to shed light on this problem. We find that this problem is not important in our context. JTPA classroom training substantially reduced unemployment durations, and thus it complements programs that increase employment durations.

We develop and test an ownership structure pecking order. Our ownership pecking order sorts out which structures are likely to have relatively fewer agency costs versus higher agency costs. At the top of the pecking order are firms with a single controlling shareholder, they have the lowest agency costs when that shareholder is not the government. Next is the presence of multiple large shareholders. They are even more effective when the large shareholders are of the same type. The structure with the highest agency costs consists of a single large non-controlling shareholder. Our empirical tests confirm this pecking order.

We develop a version of Afriat's theorem that is applicable in a variety of choice environments beyond the setting of classical consumer theory. This allows us to devise tests for rationalizability in environments where the set of alternatives is not the positive orthant of a Euclidean space and where the rationalizing utility function is required to satisfy properties appropriate to that environment. We show that our results are applicable, amongst others, to choice data on lotteries, contingent consumption, and intertemporal consumption.