We examine determinants of non-executive employee stock option holdings, grants, and exercises for 756 firms during 1994–1997. We find that firms use greater stock option compensation when facing capital requirements and financing constraints. Our results are also consistent with firms using options to attract and retain certain types of employees as well as to create incentives to increase firm value. After controlling for economic determinants and stock returns, option exercises are greater (less) when the firm's stock price hits 52-week highs (lows), which confirms in a broad sample the psychological bias documented by Heath et al. (Quarterly Journal of Economics 114 (1999) 601–628).

We study the effects of structural changes in banking markets on the supply of credit to small businesses. Specifically, we examine whether bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and entry have “external” effects on small business loans by other banks in the same local markets. The results suggest modest positive external effects from these dynamic changes in competition, except that large banks may reduce small business lending in reaction to entry. We confirm bank size and age as important determinants of this lending, and show that the measured age effect does not appear to be driven by local market M&A activity.

A seller with two objects faces a group of bidders who are subject to budget constraints. The objects have common values to all bidders but need not be identical, and may be either complements or substitutes. In a simple complete information setting we show: (1) if the objects are sold by means of a sequence of open ascending auctions, then it is always optimal to sell the more valuable object first; (2) the sequential auction yields more revenue than the simultaneous ascending auction used recently by the FCC if the discrepancy in the values is large, or if there are significant complementarities; (3) a hybrid simultaneous-sequential form is revenue superior to the sequential auction; and (4) budget constraints arise endogenously.

This paper solves numerically the intertemporal consumption and portfolio choice problem of an infinitely-lived investor who faces a time-varying equity premium. The solutions we obtain are very similar to the approximate analytical solutions of Campbell and Viceira (1999), except at the upper extreme of the state space where both the numerical consumption and portfolio rules flatten out. We also consider a constrained version of the problem in which the investor faces borrowing and short-sales restrictions. These constraints bind when the equity premium moves away from its mean in either direction, and are particularly severe for risk-tolerant investors. The constraints have substantial effects on optimal consumption, but much more modest effects on optimal portfolio choice in the region of the state space where they are not binding.

This paper extracts both the implied default recovery ratio and the risk-neutral default probability term structure for Russian Federation and Republic of Argentina US dollar Eurobonds during the 1998 Russian default crisis. This crisis provides a unique window into the impact of changing default probabilities and recovery ratio assumptions on credit-sensitive sovereign bond prices. For the Russian Eurobonds, the sample paths suggest a two-phase crisis revaluation. Shifts in default probabilities account for most of the initial price collapse. Marked decreases in the implied default recovery ratio dominate the second phase. Investors never cut their recovery value assumptions for Argentine debt.

Rosen, Stokey, and Taylor as new members of the Executive Committee. He then asked for approval of the minutes of the previous meeting (January 6, 2000) which had been circulated previously. The Secretary reported that he had received a complaint from a member that the minutes did not provide a sufficiently complete account of what is happening. Siegfried took the opportunity to review the customary style of the minutes of the Executive Committee. The minutes do not record who makes and seconds motions nor who speaks in favor or against them; they do summarize the issues raised and the arguments for and against motions. The minutes do not record vote counts, nor who votes for or against a motion; they record whether the motion passes or fails. The minutes do not record precise times individuals enter or leave the room, but rather record who was in attendance for all (or mostly all) of the meeting and who was there for only part of the meeting. Only the final decisions of the Electoral College are recorded in the minutes. After a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of more detailed minutes, the Executive

It is widely thought that incomes risks can be shared by trading in financial assets. But financial assets typically carry some risk idiosyncratic to them, hence, disposing incomes risk using financial assets will involve buying into the inherent idiosyncratic risk. However, standard theory argues that diversification would reduce the inconvenience of idiosyncratic risk to arbitrarily low levels. This paper shows that this argument is not robust: ambiguity aversion can exacerbate the tension between the two kinds of risks to the point that classes of agents may not want to trade some financial assets. Thus, theoretically, the effect of ambiguity aversion on financial markets is to make the risk sharing opportunities offered by financial markets less complete than it would be otherwise.

Increasing size of establishments and resulting concentration in U.S. industries may stem from various types of cost economies. In particular, scale economies arising from technological factors embodied in plant and equipment may be a driving force for such market structure changes. In this case, typical market power measures like Lerner indices can be misleading: if scale (cost) economies prevail, cost efficiencies rather than market deficiencies may actually underlie the observed patterns. In this study, I provide measures of scale economies and market power for the U.S. meat packing industry, whose increased consolidation and concentration have raised great concern in policy circles. The results suggest that this trend has been motivated by cost economies, but that little excess profitability exists, and on the margin the potential for taking further advantage of such economies has become minimal.

There has been little analysis of the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on U.S. wage inequality, even though the presence of foreign-owned affiliates in the United States has arguably grown more rapidly in significance for the U.S. economy than trade flows. Using U.S. manufacturing data from 1977 to 1994, we find that inward FDI has not contributed to U.S. within-industry skill upgrading. In fact, the 1980s wave of Japanese greenfield investments was significantly correlated with lower, not higher, relative demand for skilled labor. This casts doubt upon one possible channel of skill-biased technological change that was previously unexplored.