Between 1996 and 2003, the Peruvian government issued property titles to over 1.2 million urban households, the largest titling program targeted at urban squatters in the developing world. This paper examines the labor market effects of increases in tenure security resulting from the program. To isolate the causal role of ownership rights, I make use of differences across regions induced by the timing ofthe program and differences across target populations in level of preprogram ownership rights. My estimates suggest that titling results in a substantial increase in labor hours, a shift in labor supply away from work at home to work in the outside market, and substitution of adult for child labor.

Analyses of the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in expectations about the likely winner during election day. Analyzing high frequency financial fluctuations following the release of flawed exit poll data on election day 2004, and then during the vote count we find that markets anticipated higher equity prices, interest rates and oil prices, and a stronger dollar under a George W. Bush presidency than under John Kerry. A similar Republican-Democrat differential was also observed for the 2000 BushGore contest. Prediction market based analyses of all presidential elections since 1880 also reveal a similar pattern of partisan impacts, suggesting that electing a Republican president raises equity valuations by 2–3 percent, and that since Ronald Reagan, Republican presidents have tended to raise bond yields.

Auditor-client negotiation about difficult client accounting issues involves both the auditor and the client. On the client side, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) plays a central role in the financial reporting process, yet is rarely the focus of academic study. This paper reports how a sample of Canadian CFOs viewed the negotiation process and context, using an experiential questionnaire to build on the negotiation model developed and demonstrated for the auditor side of the negotiation by Gibbins, Salterio, and Webb 2001, and corroborated by a comparison of common questionnaire items across auditor and CFO samples by Gibbins, McCracken, and Salterio 2005. The CFOs saw negotiation with the auditors as a consequence of change in accounting and disclosure standards or personnel influential to their financial reporting, or business changes, such as, new business deals or acquisitions. Negotiation was thrust upon the CFO, and the CFO then had to manage it. The CFOs informed other management (such as the CEO) and was aware of their interests, but did not generally seek their help. Informing the Board or the audit committee of the issue was much less frequent. The issue being negotiated was seen as complex, requiring research and analysis, and dependent on knowledge and expertise, with the result more likely reflecting form over substance (a result some CFOs suggested was more agreeable to the auditor than to the CFO).

The lock-in effect proposes that capital gains taxes represent transaction costs that increase the reservation price for security owners and, ceteris paribus, reduce trading volume. Consistent with the lock-in effect, previous empirical research documents price and reactions to enacted changes in the capital gains tax rate. We investigate whether the volume hypothesis predicted by the lock-in effect extends to corporate acquisition activity. In particular, we analyze whether aggregate corporate acquisition activity is inversely associated with shareholder capital gains tax rates. We measure quarterly corporate acquisition activity from 1973 through 2001 using (1) the percentage of traded firms acquired in a calendar quarter and (2) the percentage of market value of traded firms acquired in a calendar quarter. In supplemental analysis, we measure acquisition activity at the industry level (i.e., as the percentage of firms and percentage of market value acquired by industry annually). In each analysis we model acquisition activity as a function of the maximum long-term capital gains tax rate for individuals and other macroeconomic factors previously hypothesized to be associated with acquisition activity. Consistent with a lock-in effect for corporate acquisitions, we find a significant negative association between corporate acquisition activity and the capital gains tax rate whether we measure acquisition activity in the aggregate or at the industry level. In addition, we find that this negative association is attributable to increased (decreased) taxable acquisition activity during periods of low (high) capital gains tax rates. These results suggest that, ceteris paribus, capital gains taxes represent significant transaction costs that influence the level of corporate acquisition activity.

We investigate incentive effects of a typical hedge fund contract for a manager with power utility. With a one-year horizon, the manager displays risk taking that varies dramatically with fund value. We extend the model to multiple yearly evaluation periods and find that the manager's risk taking is rapidly moderated if the fund performs reasonably well. The most realistic approach to modeling fund closure uses an endogenous shutdown barrier where the manager optimally chooses to shut down. The manager increases risk taking as fund value approaches that barrier, and this boundary behavior persists strongly with multiyear horizons.

Effects of Environmental and Land Use Regulation in the Oil and Gas Industry Using the Wyoming Checkerboard as a Natural Experiment: Retraction by Shelby Gerking and William E. Morgan. Published in volume 97, issue 3, pages 1032 of American Economic Review, June 2007

In this paper, we generalize the notion of Pareto-efficiency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations. Two efficiency concepts are proposed, P-efficiency and A-efficiency. The two concepts differ in how they treat potential agents that are not born. We show that these concepts are closely related to the notion of Pareto-efficiency when fertility is exogenous. We then prove versions of the first welfare theorem assuming that decision making is efficient within the dynasty. We discuss two sets of sufficient conditions for noncooperative equilibria of family decision problems to be efficient. These include the Barro and Becker model as a special case. Finally, we study examples of equilibrium settings in which fertility decisions are not efficient, and classify them into ones where inefficiencies arise inside the family and ones where they arise across families.

This paper develops a model of a monetary economy in which individual firms are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks as well as general inflation. Sellers can change price only by incurring a real “menu cost.†We calibrate this cost and the variance and autocorrelation of the idiosyncratic shock using a new U.S. data set of individual prices due to Klenow and Kryvtsov. The prediction of the calibrated model for the effects of high inflation on the frequency of price changes accords well with international evidence from various studies. The model is also used to conduct numerical experiments on the economy’s response to various shocks. In none of the simulations we conducted did monetary shocks induce large or persistent real responses.

In this short paper we take a first look at the question of whether the increasing income inequality that the US has witnessed in the past 25 years has generated increasing unhappiness in those who have been falling behind, despite their real income has risen markedly. If an individual's utility depends not only on the level of her own consumption but also on how that level compares with the consumption of others, then the observed widening of the income distribution may have implications for the happiness of different groups that go beyond those associated with the changes in their respective incomes. We find that people's happiness appears to depend positively on how well their socio-economic group is doing relative to the average in their geographic area, even after controlling for the level of their own income. In addition, we find some evidence that the relationship is much stronger for people whose group has above-average income than for people whose group has below-average income; it would thus appear that relative concerns do not become an issue until a person has attained a certain place within the income distribution.