By introducing a labor market into the neoclassical asset pricing model, limited capital market participation can be an equilibrium outcome. Labor contracts are derived endogenously as part of a dynamic equilibrium in a production economy. Firms write labor contracts that insure workers, allowing agents to achieve a Pareto optimal allocation even when the span of asset markets is restricted to just stocks and bonds. Capital markets facilitate this risk sharing because it is there that firms offload the labor market risk they assumed from workers. In effect, by investing in capital markets, investors provide insurance to wage earners who then optimally choose not to participate in capital markets.

This article reports on household survey measurements of the “offshorability” of jobs, defined as the ability to perform the work from abroad. We develop multiple measures of offshorability, using both self-reporting and professional coders. All measures find that roughly 25% of US jobs are offshorable. Our three preferred measures agree between 70% and 80% of the time. Professional coders appear to provide the most accurate assessments. Empirically, more educated workers appear to hold somewhat more offshorable jobs, and offshorability does not have systematic effects on either wages or the probability of layoff.

Commodity futures risk premiums vary across commodities and over time depending on the level of physical inventories. The convenience yield is a decreasing, nonlinear function of inventories. Price measures, such as the futures basis, prior futures returns, prior spot returns, and spot price volatilities reflect the state of inventories and are informative about commodity futures risk premiums. We verify these theoretical predictions using a comprehensive data set on 31 commodity futures and physical inventories between 1971 and 2010. We find no evidence that the positions of participants in futures markets predict risk premiums on commodity futures.

We use a new data set to study the determinants of the performance of open–end actively managed equity mutual funds in 27 countries. We find that mutual funds underperform the market overall. The results show important differences in the determinants of fund performance in the USA and elsewhere in the world. The US evidence of diminishing returns to scale is not a universal truth as the performance of funds located outside the USA and funds that invest overseas is not negatively affected by scale. Our findings suggest that the adverse scale effects in the USA are related to liquidity constraints faced by funds that, by virtue of their style, have to invest in small and domestic stocks. Country characteristics also explain fund performance. Funds located in countries with liquid stock markets and strong legal institutions display better performance.

We infer a term structure of interbank risk from spreads between rates on interest rate swaps indexed to the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and overnight indexed swaps. We develop a tractable model of interbank risk to decompose the term structure into default and non-default (liquidity) components. From August 2007 to January 2011, the fraction of total interbank risk due to default risk, on average, increases with maturity. At short maturities, the non-default component is important in the first half of the sample period and is correlated with measures of funding and market liquidity. The model also provides a framework for pricing, hedging, and risk management of interest rate swaps in the presence of significant basis risk.

We use an E-GARCH model to estimate the wealth effects of Federal Reserve lending during the financial crisis to Investment banks (I-Banks), “Too Big to Fail” (TBTF) banks, and “traditional” commercial banks. Borrowing from the Term Auction Facility program has negative wealth effects for all banks and I-banks in particular. We also find that the market view of the liquidity programs changed across the sample sub-periods. I-Bank and TBTF bank borrowing from the discount window is initially viewed positively, however continued use of the discount window and the Term Auction Facility was generally (though not universally) viewed negatively. Commercial Paper Funding Facility program participation is consistently positive only for traditional banks and programs that focus on the purchase of specific securities (e.g., commercial paper) to address specific problems also appear to primarily benefit traditional banks. The inconsistency of results across the time periods of the crisis is telling as market participants struggled to discern what access to these programs meant.

We decompose quantitative management earnings forecasts into macroeconomic and firm‐specific components to determine the extent to which voluntary disclosure provided by management has macroeconomic information content. We provide evidence that the forecasts of bellwether firms, which are defined as firms in which macroeconomic news explains the greatest amount of variation in the forecasts, provide timely information to the market about the macroeconomy when bundled with earnings announcements. Further, we show that bellwether firms provide timely information about both industry‐specific events and broader economic events. Finally, we document that the macroeconomic news in individual forecasts is more pronounced for bad news and point forecasts.

This paper provides evidence of the impact of hedge accounting under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on corporate risk man-agement. Using a sample of large UK non-financial firms from 2003 to 2006, we show that the implementation of the new standards reduces the level of asymmetric information faced by derivative users. Specifically, for firms that hedge under IFRS we find that analysts ’ forecast error and dispersion are significantly lower. The paper contributes to prior research on the effects of hedge accounting and on the adoption of IFRS.

Strategic performance measurement systems operationalize firm strategy with a set of performance measures. A consequence of such alignment is the tendency for managers to lose sight of the strategic construct(s) the measures are intended to represent, and subsequently act as though the measures are the constructs of interest, a phenomenon referred to as surrogation . We investigate how involvement in strategy selection affects managers’ propensity to exhibit surrogation. We predict and find that strategy selection reduces surrogation. Surprisingly, we do not find that engaging in strategy deliberation, a key process underlying strategy selection, reduces surrogation. Thus, managers’ involvement in the actual choice of strategy appears to be both a necessary and sufficient condition to mitigate surrogation. Our paper broadens understanding of factors that influence surrogation, such as the effects of different aspects of managers’ strategic involvement and buy‐in. Further, by documenting how managers behave within (as opposed to simply with ) strategic performance measurement systems, we highlight the potential for managers to endogenously influence the effectiveness of such systems.

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for noneconomic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth. We show that West German households who had social ties to East Germany in 1989 experienced a persistent rise in their personal incomes after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the presence of these households significantly affects economic performance at the regional level: it increases the returns to entrepreneurial activity, the share of households who become entrepreneurs, and the likelihood that firms based within a given West German region invest in East Germany. As a result, West German regions that (for idiosyncratic reasons) have a high concentration of households with social ties to the East exhibit substantially higher growth in income per capita in the early 1990s. A one standard deviation rise in the share of households with social ties to East Germany in 1989 is associated with a 4.7 percentage point rise in income per capita over six years. We interpret our findings as evidence of a causal link between social ties and regional economic development.