This article estimates the effects of changes in pension plans and social security in the 1970s and 1980s on the steady state retirement of men. Work incentives associated with pension coverage and plan characteristics are calculated primarily from the 1969–79 Retirement History Study and the 1983 and 1989 Surveys of Consumer Finances. Simulations with a structural retirement model suggest that the long‐run effects of changes in pension plans and social security account for about a quarter of the reduction in full‐time work by men in their early sixties but cannot explain the reduction by those age 65.

Contrary to previous studies, we find managers change depreciation policies in predictable ways. We identify three dimensions of depreciation-policy changes: whether it is a method change or an estimate revision; whether it is income-increasing or decreasing; and whether it applies to new assets only or both new and existing assets. This disaggregation leads to three findings: First, a 1981 tax law altered the frequency of estimate revisions and method changes. Second, firms adopting income-increasing method changes for all assets experience worse performance than those adopting such changes only for new assets. Finally, non-income-increasing policy changes are associated with changes in investment opportunities.

This paper evaluates the loss of global welfare from exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, such as oil. The underlying methodology represents an empirical application of some recent developments in the theory of green accounting and sustainability. The paper estimates that the world loses the equivalent of about 1 percent of final consumption per year from finiteness of the earth's resources, compared with a counterfactual trajectory where global extraction of minerals is allowed to remain forever constant at today's flow rates and extraction costs.

High consumer indebtedness threatens future consumption spending if default is expensive. Consumer spending collapsed in 1930, turning a minor recession into the Great Depression. Households were shouldering an unprecedented burden of installment debt. Down payments were large. Contracts were short. Equity in durable goods was therefore acquired quickly. Missed installment pa5niients triggered repossession, reducing consumer wealth in 1930 because households lost all acquired equity. Cutting consumption was the only viable strategy in 1930 for avoiding default. Institutional changes lowered the cost of default by 1938. When recession began again, indebted households chose to default rather than reduce consumption.

Jobs with performance-related pay (PRP) attract workers of higher ability and induce workers to provide greater effort. The authors construct an integrated model of effort and sorting that clarifies the distinction between observable and unobservable ability and the relationship between earnings and productivity. Predictions are tested against data from the British Household Panel Survey. The PRP raises wages by 9 percent for men and 6 percent for women. Theoretical calculations show that these estimated earnings differentials represent average productivity differentials net of monitoring costs at the marginal firm using PRP but not of the disutility of additional effort expended by workers. Copyright 1999 by University of Chicago Press.

The proportional hazard model with unobserved heterogeneity gives the hazard function of a random variable conditional on covariates and a second random variable representing unobserved heterogeneity. This paper shows how to estimate the baseline hazard function and the distribution of the unobserved heterogeneity nonparametrically. The baseline hazard function and heterogeneity distribution are assumed to satisfy smoothness conditions but are not assumed to belong to known, finite-dimensional, parametric families. Existing estimators assume that the baseline hazard function or heterogeneity distribution belongs to a known parametric family. Thus, the estimators presented here are more general than existing ones.

Relative performance evaluation (RPE) is likely to improve boards of director's ability to identify unfit CEOs, and competition is likely to enhance the usefulness of RPE. Consistent with our hypotheses, the frequency of CEO turnover is greater in highly competitive industries than in less competitive industries. We also find that RPE-based (firm-specific) accounting measures are more closely associated with CEO turnover in high (low) competition industries than in low (high) competition industries. These findings suggest that the lack of support for RPE in prior studies results from not considering the effects of competition.

These remarks discuss why the “cluster” of financial services and local banking markets are still relevant for antitrust analysis in banking. A key portion of the Federal Reserve’s Order approving the NationsBank–Barnett merger is interpreted, and the extent to which antitrust is a practical constraint on the development of a nationwide banking structure is commented upon.