In recent years, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and many journalists have argued that workers are more anxious about losing their jobs than they were in the past. I use the 1977‐96 General Social Survey to document trends in workers' beliefs about their own job security. During the 1990s, workers have been more pessimistic about losing their jobs in the next 12 months than workers were during the 1980s. Workers have also been more concerned about suffering future job loss that would have resulted in a decline in earnings or a spell of unemployment.

We examine the effect of option listing on the immediate stock-price response to earnings announcements. Contrary to prior studies using earlier data, we find firms initiating option trading after 1986 fail to exhibit a significant decline in earnings response. We then examine 420 firms initiating option trading during 1973–1993. In a series of tests controlling for market-wide effects and changing firm size we find some evidence that option listing may actually increase the stock-price response to earnings, but no evidence listing reduces the response. Both longitudinal and cross-sectional tests produce similar results.

Swedish lottery bonds offer a unique opportunity to study ex-day effects in an environment where cash distributions are tax-advantaged relative to capital gains. Thus, in the lottery bond market, we observe a reversal of the preference for capital gains that researchers have cited as an explanation for the ex-day behavior of U.S. equities. Further, in this market there are barriers to short-term arbitrage when prices do reflect the tax preferences of individual investors. We find the bonds are priced around the ex-day to reflect differential tax rates on income and capital gains consistent with the prevailing tax regimes. The bonds consistently experience negative returns over the coupon payment period, and in fact often sell at negative yields prior to the cash distribution, as one would expect given tax-motivated trading between high-tax investors, who buy prior to the distribution, and low-tax investors, who buy after the distribution.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of legal penalties on audit quality under different legal regimes. We investigate whether audit quality is affected differentially due to the complexity inherent in legal regimes and the frequency of imposing legal penalties. Economic theory predicts that players adopt equilibrium strategies that reflect the expectation that a penalty will be incurred, but the actual occurrences of penalties, if consistent with this expectation, should not prompt an individual to modify his or her strategy. However, learning theory suggests that players' choices will be repeated in the future based on outcomes. We found that penalties triggered both increases and decreases in effort, and seemed to introduce a “shock” that increased the variability of effort. We also observed a “funnel” effect — that is. greater changes in effort closer to the imposition of penalties, and smaller changes as more periods go by without a penalty.

I study workers' incentives to invest in general human capital (education) in the presence of search‐induced unemployment. Workers queue for jobs, and firms prefer to hire the most productive applicants because of rent sharing. As a result, an unemployed worker's ranking relative to other job seekers will influence his job‐finding rate. This creates a “rat race,” where workers invest in education partly in order to achieve a better ranking. In equilibrium, identical workers may have incentives to diversify in terms of education, and the investments in education may exceed the socially optimal level.

In many real-world situations, agents must formulate option exercise strategies with imperfect information. In such a setting, agents may infer the private signals of other agents through their observed exercise strategies. The building of an office building, the drilling of an exploratory oil well, and the commitment of a pharmaceutical company toward the research of a new drug all convey private information to other market participants. This article develops an equilibrium framework for option exercise games with asymmetric private information. Many interesting aspects of the patterns of equilibrium exercise are analyzed. In particular, informational cascades, where agents ignore their private information and jump on the exercise bandwagon, may arise endogenously.

A firm's instantaneous probability of default is modeled as a translated square-root diffusion process modified to allow the process to be correlated with default-free interest rates. The parameters of the process are estimated for 161 firms. An extended Kalman filter approach is used that incorporates both the time-series and cross-sectional (term structure) properties of the individual firms' bond prices. The model is reasonably successful at fitting corporate bond yields, while key features of the term structures of yield spreads are captured in the signs and magnitudes of the resulting parameter estimates.

The prospect of introducing securitization to a novice — whether it be a newly minted graduate of business or law school, or a seasoned CFO of a corporation that is considering its first securitization — is daunting. The elegance of the theoretical concept becomes quickly mired in the interdependent demands of accounting, taxation, bankruptcy and securities laws, and the ever-changing contours of the investor marketplace as soon as the novice begins to ask questions. Successful completion of real-world securitization transactions requires not only cooperation among professionals in a variety of disciplines, but an intimate understanding of the parameters of those disciplines. The prospect of a primer that would provide a first glimpse of the contours of this terrain would be a welcome addition to the library of many a law firm, accounting firm, or investment bank. Alas, A Primer on Securitization, edited by Leon T. Kendall and Michael J. Fishman, is not that book. The primer is instead is a collection of essays by some of the pivotal players in the development of securitization over the last quarter century, drawn from an eight-week colloquium held in 1994 at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Each has a vantage point. Each has war stories. Each brings the vocabulary of its author's discipline to the attention of the novice. The essays function as introductory material in the sense that they expose the novice reader to a number of perspectives and, in so doing, to the terms, phrases, and trains of thought inherent in each.