IN the Far East, the overall volume of intraregional trade is not as substantial as that of Europe, but much larger than that of Latin America.2 One rather unique and very interesting feature of Far Eastern intraregional trade is that one country, namely, Japan, stands out prominently, from the point of view of both the character and magnitude of its trade. Japan contributed about one-third of the Far Eastern intraregional trade in the immediate prewar years (32.3 per cent for 1935, 34.5 per cent for 1937, and 38.o per cent for I938). Immediately after the cessation of hostilities, its share suffered a sharp reduction, but again became a significant percentage of the total in 1949 (I6.5 per cent). The ratio of Far Eastern intraregional trade to its total export, and Japan's share in intraregional trade showed a tendency to fluctuate together.3 Since Japan's share was about one-third in the prewar period and its intraregional imports were related to the volume of total intraregional exports, several questions may be raised with regard to the future role of Japan in the intraregional trade of the Far East. What are the initial and secondary effects of Japan's imports from the Far East on the intraregional exports of the countries of this region? Does such relationship in the prewar period remain true in the postwar period? If there is a change of preand postwar relationships, what are some of the reasons for the change? How are Japan's imports from the Far East related to the over-all exports of the region to all countries? This paper is a preliminary attempt at an analysis of the above questions.

We examine the role private equity (PE) sponsors play in the resolution of financial distress of portfolio companies. PE-backed firms have higher leverage and default at higher rates than other companies borrowing in leveraged loan markets. But, PE-backed firms restructure more quickly, avoid bankruptcy court more often, and liquidate less often compared to other highly leveraged firms experiencing financial distress. PE owners are also more likely to retain control post-restructuring, often by infusing capital as firms approach distress. While default frequencies are higher among PE-backed firms, PE investors appear to manage financial distress at lower cost compared to other owners. (JEL G23, G32, G33)

In this article we investigate the disincentive effects of shortening the potential duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We identify these disincentive effects by exploiting changes in Slovenia’s unemployment insurance system—a “natural experiment” that involved substantial reductions in the potential duration of benefits for four groups of workers plus no change in benefits for another group (which served as a natural control). We find that the change had a positive effect on the exit rate from unemployment—to new jobs and other options—for unemployment spells of various lengths and for several categories of unemployed workers.

We use data from the Canadian 2-year longitudinal Labour Market Activity Survey of 1986-87 to estimate the effect of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system on job duration. Particular attention is focused on the "entrance requirements" of the UI system, which relate eligibility for UI benefits to an individual's recent employment history. The article makes operational the UI entrance requirement provisions which take into account variations in the regional unemployment rate. Controlling for many personal and job characteristics, we find evidence that a significant number of jobs terminate when they have reached the duration that would permit a UI claim.

A model of unemployment duration is estimated with weekly micro data on Canadian men. Ent itlement provisions in the unemployment insurance program and demand conditions are found to have a significant effect on the probability of leaving unemployment. The probability of a worker leaving unemploy ment declines with the duration of unemployment, holding unemployment insurance entitlement constant. When entitlement is allowed to vary, the probability of leaving first falls and then generally rises with unemployment duration. These results are robust with respect to allo wing for person-specific unobserved heterogeneity and alternative spe cifications of duration dependence. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of how job search requirements under various government programs influence job search behavior. The analysis indicates that job search requirements exert a significant impact on certain aspects of the job search process, but not those that generally lead to a higher probability of employment. It is also found that persons who utilize intensively search activities that result in direct employer contact have much shorter durations of unemployment than persons who do not utilize such activities intensively. It is speculated that altering job search requirements to include more direct employer contact could lead to a significant reduction in unemployment.

In a recent article appearing in this journal [2] Jonathan Ingersoll developed a normative multidimensional security pricing model for the individual investor in which he corrected errors in an earlier attempt by William Jean [3] [4] [5] at developing such a model. The purpose of this correction is to clarify and correct certain parts of Ingersoll's correction of Jean's work.

FEW WOULD DISAGREE that Adam Smith's invisible-hand theorem is the heart of the economist's Weltanschauung. Ask whether trade barriers should be lowered, the spread of multinational corporations restrained, oil prices deregulated, cartels dissolved, or more fundamentally whether a market-based capitalist system is economically superior to a state-run socialist system, and economists almost certainly will begin to answer the question by trying to apply the theorem. Every student knows that the theorem depends on the assumption of atomistic competition, which in turn assumes that the system is decentralized and that no competitor is large relatively to others. There is another crucial assumption, however, that is often ignored and usually underemphasized, namely that all competition is price competition. In reality one of the most distinctive features of capitalism-one that is most often raised in lay discussions of its merits and demerits-is the prevalence of other forms of competition, such as competition in research, development, and advertising; competition to obtain and hold monopoly; and competition for corporate growth. These various forms of competition, we shall aim to show, are not clearly analogous with the theory of price competition: more non-price competition, rather than less, is not necessarily Pareto optimal. Self-evidently, the production side of a market economy is decentralized only to a limited degree, i.e., to the level of a decision-making unit composed of more than one human. Such a unit-playing Neuron to the Invisible Hand-is typically called a firm. It is in fact a team. Rather than remaining small, firms are in practice composed of any number of individuals from a handful on to half a million. Some

We estimate the longer-run effects of attending an effective high school (one that improves a combination of test scores, survey measures of socioemotional development, and behaviors in ninth grade) for students who are more versus less educationally advantaged. All students benefit from attending effective schools, but the least advantaged students experience larger improvements in high school graduation, college going, and school-based arrests. Test score value-added understates the long-run importance of effective schools, particularly for less advantaged populations. Patterns suggest that this may, in part, reflect less advantaged students being relatively more responsive to non-test-score dimensions of school quality.