A model of unemployment duration is estimated with weekly micro data on Canadian men. Ent itlement provisions in the unemployment insurance program and demand conditions are found to have a significant effect on the probability of leaving unemployment. The probability of a worker leaving unemploy ment declines with the duration of unemployment, holding unemployment insurance entitlement constant. When entitlement is allowed to vary, the probability of leaving first falls and then generally rises with unemployment duration. These results are robust with respect to allo wing for person-specific unobserved heterogeneity and alternative spe cifications of duration dependence. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

The primary objective of this paper is to derive a multi-factor equilibrium model using a mean-variance approach. The results of this derivation provide greater insight into the nature of the resulting factors than does APT. There are several important implications for empirical tests of any a priori defined multi-factor model.

This study conducts an empirical test to examine wh ether the observed non-normal distribution of currency futures price changes isgenerated by the relationship between maturity and variability. In general, the author finds that the relationship between maturity and vari-ability is not suff icient to explain the observed non- normality. Although some amount of non-statio narity is present in the scale and in the characteristic exponent, the non-norma l stable Paretian distribution adequately describes futures price changes for mo st currencies and most contracts during the period covered in thisstudy Copyright 1987 by MIT Press.

This paper examines the effect of risk differences on the oft-documented negative rela? tionship between stock returns and inflation. We find risk-related patterns of coefficients on our estimates of the level and change in expected inflation and on unexpected inflation. These patterns are consistent with the hypothesis developed in Fama [2] and in Geske and Roll [7] that future real output growth simultaneously helps to determine current stock returns and various measures of inflation.

This paper studies the random walk, in a general time series setting that allows for weakly dependent and heterogeneously distributed innovations. It is shown that simple least squares regression consistently estimates a unit root under very general conditions in spite of the presence of autocorrelated errors. The limiting distribution of the standardized estimator and the associated regression t statistic are found using functional central limit theory. New tests of the random walk hypothesis are developed which permit a wide class of dependent and heterogeneous innovation sequences. A new limiting distribution theory is constructed based on the concept of continuous data recording. This theory, together with an asymptotic expansion that is developed in the paper for the unit root case, explain many of the interesting experimental results recently reported in Evans and Savin (1981, 1984).

This study uses capital market data to measure the effects of REIT mergers on the wealth of the acquiring trust's shareholders. A significant increase in shareholder wealth is detected. This differs from the findings of other acquisition studies. The primary source of the value gain seems to be improved management of the acquired trust's assets.

A wage offer can be either acceptable or unacceptable to a worker, but in cross-sectional and panel data only acceptable wage offers are observed. An OLS wage equation will not reveal how job tenure affects wage offers but rather will reveal how tenure affects acceptable wage offers. By jointly modeling the firm's determination of the wage offer and the worker's decision to accept or reject the offer, we are able to estimate the effect of job tenure on wage offers consistently. In contrast to the usual OLS results, we find that job tenure has no statistically significant effect on wage offers.

Full-information maximum likelihood is used to estimate union wage, hours, and earnings markups. Construction union wage markups are positive (58.2% at the sample means). Since union hours markups are negative (-4.0%) for most demographic groups, union earnings markups (51.1%) are smaller than the wage markups. All exogenous variables are allowed to interact with the endogenous union dummy variable, which allows us to test whether markups vary across demographic groups, whether increased local unionization has a positive spillover effect in the nonunion sector, and whether increased local unemployment equally affects wages and hours in increased local unemployment equally affects wages and hours in the two sectors.