The evidence that unions substantially increase productivity is contradicted by the evidence that the effect of unions on employment is small. It is shown in this paper that if the union is constrained by the firm's demand function, and it is the efficiency units of labor that are in the demand function, then essentially the only way to resolve this contradiction is for unions to raise the productivity of capital (and not of labor) under conditions where the substitutability between labor and capital is very limited. But estimates of the substitutability parameter are near unity, so that one of these effects must be wrong: either unions do not substantially increase productivity or they substantially reduce employment.

Participants in labor market experiments are aware that the experiments run for a limited amount of time. Thus behavior during a temporary experiment will be different than if the experimental change in constraints confronting participants were permanent. In evaluating changes in policy, however, the response to permanent changes is of primary interest. The paper analyzes conditions under which permanent responses can be inferred from data on temporary experiments.

This paper studies the life-cycle consumption and portfolio choice problem taking account of annuity risk at retirement. The study allows for government-provided annuity income. Optimally, households allocate retirement wealth to nominal, inflation-linked and variable annuities, and condition this choice on the state of the economy. The case in which there are limitations in the types of annuities that are available is also considered and the costs of annuity market incompleteness are quantified. Subsequently, the paper determines how investors optimally anticipate annuitization before retirement. The conclusion is that ignoring annuity risk before and at retirement can be economically costly.

David J. Cherrington, J. Owen Cherrington, Appropriate Reinforcement Contingencies in the Budgeting Process, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 11, Empirical Research in Accounting: Selected Studies 1973 (1973), pp. 225-253

Fragmented trading is widespread. Chowdhry and Nanda [Chowdhry, B., Nanda, V., 1991. Multimarket trading and market liquidity. Rev. Finan. Stud. 4, 483–511] show that some traders benefit by splitting orders across markets at the cost of small liquidity traders who, for exogenous reasons, only trade locally. We extend their model to analyze British and Dutch stocks with ADRs, which trade on both sides of the Atlantic for one or two hours each day. We predict that, in the presence of sufficient small liquidity trading, traders concentrate their trades in the overlapping period and split orders across markets. We document considerable empirical support. In the cross-section, we find order-splitting only for ADRs with most NYSE small liquidity trading. The evidence is (i) increased volatility, increased volume, and (weakly) higher liquidity supply in the overlap and (ii) positive correlation in order imbalance across markets. We further find that the common component in order imbalance has long-term price impact, which supports the notion that these order-splitters are informed traders.

This paper illustrates how non-contractual legal rules sometimes alleviate contractual incompleteness. A serious incompleteness in debt contracts is the borrower's ability to fraudulently transfer assets to third parties, rendering the borrower insolvent. The incompleteness arises because contractual remedies are ineffective against third-party transferees who are not bound by the debt contract, while the borrower has no assets to recover. Fraudulent conveyance law is a non-contractual legal rule allowing recovery against these transferees. This increases debt capacity most dramatically for borrowers with highly liquid assets. Without non-contractual legal rules, high liquidation value implies low debt capacity. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G32; G38.

We examine the financing and insurance policies of a firm with private information regarding its operating cash flows and insurance risk. When its insurable losses are small, the firm chooses either self-insurance or full insurance. It chooses self-insurance, it may display a preference for equity financing. However, if it chooses full insurance, it prefers debt financing. When the firm′s insurable losses are large, its insurance and financing decisions can signal its private information. While both debt and equity complement insurance decisions in signaling private information, debt facilitates signaling favorable information for a larger set of parameters. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D82, G22, G32.

We examine expectation documents’ effectiveness as an activism tool. We use the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s release of a corporate governance expectation document as a natural experiment. We introduce a novel, three-way analytical decomposition of the firms, the fund, and their joint response to this document. Firms’ governance practices adapt to the fund’s new portfolio-wide governance preferences, with heterogeneous responses across ownership and firm characteristics. The fund’s investment policies also change, even at the expense of financial returns. Overall, our research demonstrates the potential effectiveness of expectation documents as an emerging, low-cost activism tool for universal investors.

No previous infectious disease outbreak, including the Spanish Flu, has affected the stock market as forcefully as the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, previous pandemics left only mild traces on the U.S. stock market. We use text-based methods to develop these points with respect to large daily stock market moves back to 1900 and with respect to overall stock market volatility back to 1985. We also evaluate potential explanations for the unprecedented stock market reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. The evidence we amass suggests that government restrictions on commercial activity and voluntary social distancing, operating with powerful effects in a service-oriented economy, are the main reasons the U.S. stock market reacted so much more forcefully to COVID-19 than to previous pandemics in 1918–1919, 1957–1958, and 1968.