The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) granted amnesty to approximately 1.7 million long‐term unauthorized workers in an effort to bring them “out of the shadows” and improve their labor market opportunities. An analysis of wages using panel data for a sample of legalized men provides evidence that wage determinants are structurally different after amnesty for them but not for the comparison group as measured during the same time periods. The wage penalty for being unauthorized is estimated to range from 14% to 24%. The wage benefit of legalization under IRCA was approximately 6%.

Lee (1988) finds that LIFO firms have higher earnings‐price (EP) ratios than non‐LIFO firms despite the income‐reducing effects of LIFO, a result contrary to economic intuition that Lee describes as a “puzzle.” This paper attempts to resolve this puzzle by introducing refined measures of variables that are related to both EP ratios and inventory costing method choices. The improved proxies are analysts' expectations of future growth rather than realized growth, beta computed using a procedure designed to reduce measurement error rather than the usual OLS beta, and leverage as a supplemental risk measure. Further, we control for expected earnings changes, since transitory earnings shocks that are not expected to persist in future earnings affect the numerator of the EP ratio. After controlling for these factors, we find that EP ratios for LIFO firms are actually lower than those of non‐LIFO firms, a result consistent with economic intuition and the result expected by Lee.

How costly is the poor governance of market intermediaries? Using unique trade level data from the stock market in Pakistan, we find that when brokers trade on their own behalf, they earn annual rates of return that are 50-90 percentage points higher than those earned by outside investors. Neither market timing nor liquidity provision by brokers can explain this profitability differential. Instead we find compelling evidence for a specific trade-based “pump and dump” price manipulation scheme: When prices are low, colluding brokers trade amongst themselves to artificially raise prices and attract positive-feedback traders. Once prices have risen, the former exit leaving the latter to suffer the ensuing price fall. Conservative estimates suggest these manipulation rents can account for almost a half of total broker earnings. These large rents may explain why market reforms are hard to implement and emerging equity markets often remain marginal with few outsiders investing and little capital raised.

Increasingly, attention is being focused on the usefulness of manpower information systems in the firm. The demand for this information emanates from three distinct levels. Level I: Manpower Information for Legal Compliance Decisions. The primary focus here is in developing information systems which provide necessary data for governmental units such as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Social Security Administration, and similar organizations which monitor employment practices, collect taxes, or engage in policy-making activities. Level 1I: Manpower Information as an Input to Manpower Planning. In this area, the objective is to provide management with data to be used in making numerous decisions regarding the allocation and pricing of human resources including recruitment, training, utilization, and termination. Level III: Manpower Information as an Input to the Valuation of Human Assets for External Reporting. Here, the objective is to provide independent information in the basic financial reports regarding heretofore unreported human assets possessed by the entity. While the accounting literature on human resources has dealt with all three levels of manpower information systems (e.g., see Picur [1973] and Flamholtz [1974]), most authors have given only cursory attention to the basic economic foundation underlying the existence of unrecorded human assets. Our purpose in this paper is to explore the economic and accounting assumptions underlying this literature and to develop criteria for the employee training conditions under which such assets might exist. In the economic literature, there already exists a reasonably well de-

We document that defined benefit pension plans with significant holdings in private equity (PE) earn substantially greater returns than plans with small holdings, in both the 1990s and the 2000s. A one standard deviation increase in PE holdings is associated with 4% greater returns per year. Up to one-third of this outperformance comes from lower costs that we link to economizing on costly intermediation by avoiding fund-of-funds and investing directly. The bulk of the outperformance comes from superior gross returns only partially explained by access and experience. We conjecture that larger PE investors have superior due diligence and ability to bridge information asymmetries in PE.

This paper uses style analysis to investigate whether Euro-zone equity returns are driven by country or industry effects over the 1990–2008 period. We find that before the introduction of the Euro, country effects dominate, while industry effects prevail after 1999. This reversal is driven mainly by the countries that were least integrated in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and world markets in the early 1990s and for which the EMU convergence process led to rapid strengthening of linkages with the core Euro-zone. For markets with stronger economic linkages, industry effects dominate both before and after the introduction of the Euro.

We analyzed the loan guarantees that the Japanese government provided for banks’ loans to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We modeled and estimated how much and under what conditions loan guarantees affected banks’ risk-taking and banks’ non-guaranteed lending. In the presence of controls for bank capital and other factors that might affect supplies of bank credit, our estimates supported our model's implications that loan guarantees increased banks’ risk-taking. Consistent with our model, our estimates imply that, when banks initially had fewer guaranteed loans and then got more guaranteed loans, guaranteed loans were complements to, rather than substitutes for, non-guaranteed loans. As complements, loan guarantees could be “high-powered” in that they generated increases not only in guaranteed loans, but also increases in non-guaranteed loans that were a multiple of the increases in guaranteed loans. In addition, banks’ having more capital was associated with doing more non-guaranteed lending.

We examine the effects of regulations designed to address the potential conflict of interest that arises when sell-side analyst research is not independent of investment banking. We focus on two types of regulation: (1) internal barriers between equity research and investment banking that restrict communication; and (2) disclosure requirements relating to analyst compensation. We find that information barriers can increase research effort and improve report quality by limiting an investment bank's ability to distort its analyst's incentives. However, this type of regulation can also reduce information production and lower the quality of reports if an investment bank benefits directly from research activity. Disclosure requirements, on the other hand, unambiguously lead to more informative prices and a higher report quality relative to either information barriers or no regulation.