Knowledge of the one-month interest rate is useful in forecasting the sign as well as the variance of the excess return on stocks. The services of a portfolio manager who makes use of the forecasting model to shift funds between bills and stocks would be worth an annual management fee of 2% of the value of the assets managed. During 1954:4 to 1986:12, the variance of monthly returns on the managed portfolio was about 60% of the variance of the returns on the value weighted index, whereas the average return was two basis points higher.

Unequal access to financing for education may be an important source of educational differences. We develop a model relating sib schooling and earnings similarities to sibship size with and without equal access and estimate it for the education of veterans, for whom the GI Bill assured equal access, and for their children, who had no such government assistance. We find an inverse relationship between sibship size and sib schooling and earnings similarities for the children, but not for the veterans; we conclude that, in the absence of equal access policies, unequal access is an important source of educational differences.

A significant proportion of migration in low-income countries, particularly in rural areas, is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage. The authors seek to explain these mobility patterns based on a framework in which the marriage of daughters to locationally distant, dispersed yet kinship-related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks. Analyses of longitudinal data on consumption patterns, income, and marital arrangements in South Indian households lend support to the theory.

The main result of this paper is that the multiple equilibrium problem in mechanism design can be avoided in private-value models if agents do not use weakly dominated strategies in equilibrium. We show that in such settings, any incentive-compatible allocation rule can be made the unique equilibrium outcome to a mechanism. We derive a general necessary condition for unique implementation that implies that the positive result for private-value models applies with considerably less generality to common-value settings.

This article presents information on various books related to accountancy. The book "An Accountant's Guide to Databases," by K.N. Bhasker, examines the basic concepts and terminology of database management and its implications for the field of accounting. The book begins with a brief introduction to current micro-technology and the organization of computer files and defines three distinctive meanings of the term database relevant to its use in accounting. The purpose of the book "Comprehensive Auditing in Canada: Theory and Practice," by James Cutt, is the development of a theory and methodology for a comprehensive auditing model by examination of current theory and practice in the areas of auditing and policy analysis or program evaluation. The theory and methodology developed is designed primarily for the nonprofit component of the public sector but is extended to the profit component of the public and private sectors. In the book "The British Accounting Review Research Register 1988," edited by K.P. Gee and R.H. Gray, the data presented has been gathered from across 90 universities, polytechnics and colleges, and provides information on 1,072 accounting and finance academic staff members throughout the British Isles.