This article empirically examines married women's labor supply and child care expenditures. The article uses winter 1984-85 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to estimate a fully structural econometric model of labor supply and paid care utilization. Estimation results indicate that the cost of paid care has small negative effects on labor supply but stronger negative effects on paid care utilization. Consequently, subsidy programs such as the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit appear to have few effects on married mothers' employment.

This paper partially fills a theoretical void by developing an integrated model of the various branches of the medical community. A consistent and general framework is adopted to analyze equilibrium within the market for medical services under a stylized form of socialized medicine, without invoking demand shifting. The optimization problem faced by each agent is specified and the equilibrium is defined. The effect of various parameter changes on the market for medical services is analyzed. The predictions are not contradicted by the stylized facts.

We analyse the role of house prices in the monetary policy transmission mechanism in Norway, Sweden and the UK, using structural VARs. A solution is proposed to the endogeneity problem of identifying shocks to interest rates and house prices by using a combination of short-run and long-run (neutrality) restrictions. By allowing the interest rate and house prices to react simultaneously to news, we find the role of house prices in the monetary transmission mechanism to increase considerably. In particular, house prices react immediately and strongly to a monetary policy shock. Furthermore, the fall in house prices enhances the negative response in output and consumer price inflation that has traditionally been found in the conventional literature. Moreover, we find that the interest rate responds systematically to a change in house prices. However, the strength and timing of response varies between the countries, suggesting that housing may play a different role in the monetary policy setting.

This study examines online multi-unit, discriminatory, ascending auctions of certificates of deposit. We find evidence suggesting that the most aggressive bids are likely to occur at the beginning and the end of the auctions. The opening of the auction serves an important role in price discovery. In addition, in multi-unit auctions last-minute bidding is a conditional strategy, and is used only when bidding is intense. Furthermore, we provide evidence suggesting that revenues are increasing in the depth of the market, in the concentration of early bids, and in bank participation relative to the size of the principal.

Our data show that nearly all firms borrow for the first time in their life from a single bank, but soon afterward some of them start borrowing from additional banks. Duration analysis shows that the likelihood of a firm substituting a single relationship with multiple relationships increases with the duration of that relationship. It also shows that this substitution is more likely to occur for firms with more growth opportunities and for firms with poor performance. The analysis of the ex post effects of the initiation of multiple relationships, in turn, shows that firms with higher levels of investment prior to the initiation of multiple relationships increase their investment even further when they start to borrow from multiple banks and that firms with poor prior performance continue to perform poorly afterward. These results suggest that concerns with hold-up costs, together with an unwillingness by the incumbent bank to increase its exposure to a firm because of its past poor performance, are the key reasons for these firms to initiate an additional relationship this early in their life. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G21, G32.

This paper develops a novel method for classifying oil price changes as supply or demand driven using information in asset prices. Motivated by a simple model, demand shocks are identified as returns to an index of oil producing firms which are orthogonal to unexpected changes in the VIX index, with supply shocks capturing the remaining variation in oil prices. Demand shocks are strongly positively correlated with market returns and economic output, whereas supply shocks have a strong negative correlation. The negative correlation of supply shocks and returns is strongest in industries that produce consumer goods, while the positive correlation of demand shocks is stronger for industries which use relatively large amounts of oil as an input.

Firms with central boards of directors earn superior risk-adjusted stock returns. A long (short) position in the most (least) central firms earns average annual returns of 4.68%. Firms with central boards also experience higher future return-on-assets growth and more positive analyst forecast errors. Return prediction, return-on-assets growth, and analyst errors are concentrated among high growth opportunity firms or firms confronting adverse circumstances, consistent with boardroom connections mattering most for firms standing to benefit most from information and resources exchanged through boardroom networks. Overall, our results suggest that director networks provide economic benefits that are not immediately reflected in stock prices.

I provide evidence that investors overweight analyst forecasts by demonstrating that prices do not fully reflect predictable components of analyst errors, which conflicts with conclusions in prior research. I highlight estimation bias in traditional approaches and develop a new approach that reduces this bias. I estimate characteristic forecasts that map current firm characteristics into forecasts of future earnings. Contrasting characteristic and analyst forecasts predicts analyst forecast errors and revisions. I find abnormal returns to strategies that sort firms by predicted forecast errors, consistent with investors overweighting analyst forecasts and predictable biases in analyst forecasts influencing the information content of prices.