Abstract This article studies the case of market reactions to accounting policy deliberations. The purpose of the article paper is to point out several shortcomings of a study by some researchers and to suggest an alternative framework for testing for potential market reactions to a series of events such as FASB deliberations on inflation accounting. The general research approach employed by researchers is premised on the argument that market reactions to FASB inflation accounting deliberations can be determined, appropriately, by examining the association between abnormal returns of firms for various announcements. Perhaps the most significant limitations stems from the fact that the correlation approach is an awkward, if not inappropriate methodology for application to research problems where the number of variates. The exclusive reliance on that methodology by researchers, therefore, is surprising since there exist alternative research paradigms which, although not free of shortcomings, avoid some problems.

Partial or total durability characterizes a large class of exhaustible resources. We show that Hotelling's r-percent rule will apply to a durable resource produced in a competitive market, but will not apply if the resource is produced in a monopolistic market. However, the r-percent rule does not mean that price is steadily rising. We show that in general the competitive market price will fall initially as the stock in circulation increases, and later will rise as the stock decreases and eventually depreciates toward zero after production ceases. Accounting for durability may thus help explain the U-shaped long-term price profiles observed for many resources.

We estimate substitution possibilities among a set of age-race-sex groups in the labor force. The estimates are based on cross-section data from SMSAs in 1969, and they allow us to consider how substitutable adult women are for young women or young men. The estimates are used, along with assumptions about the extent of wage rigidity and elasticities of labor supply, to simulate the direct and indirect effects of the growth of the female labor force on job opportunities for youth, assuming rigid wages for young workers, and on the wage rates of adult males, assuming these wages are flexible.