I test the hypothesis that short debt maturity attenuates the negative effect of growth opportunities on leverage. Using simultaneous equations with leverage and maturity endogenous, I find strong support for an economically significant attenuation effect. The negative effect of growth opportunities on leverage for firms with all shorter-term debt is less than one-sixth as large as the effect for firms with all longer-term debt. Short maturity also increases liquidity risk, however, which negatively affects leverage. The results suggest that firms trade off the cost of underinvestment problems against the cost of liquidity risk when choosing short maturity.

Abarbanell and Lehavy provide evidence that analysts’ forecast errors are not normally distributed exhibiting a high occurrence of extreme negative forecast errors (left-tail asymmetry) and a high occurrence of small positive forecast errors (middle asymmetry). This is important for researchers who rely on techniques that are sensitive to the distributional assumptions of analysts’ forecast errors. Many of the conclusions drawn by Abarbanell and Lehavy, however, are based on visual impressions (as opposed to formal empirical tests) or based on methods that are very sensitive to the empirical methods used (e.g., whether the serial correlation of forecast errors is caused by the left-tail asymmetry).

Agency costs are a cost of production, and firms that do a better job of minimizing these costs should exhibit better performance. This paper tests this hypothesis by calculating the performance elasticity of average employee hourly compensation for U.S. manufacturing firms. This elasticity indicates the degree of alignment between employee and shareholder objectives. The estimated elasticity is indistinguishable from zero in low performance firms, and it equals 0.193 in high performance firms. While it is difficult to know whether an elevated performance sensitivity causes better firm performance, clearly the best performers in manufacturing industries link average employee pay to performance.

This paper estimates the intensity of the value-maximization incentives for average employees generated through the combination of wage, salary, and bonus mechanisms. This is accomplished through estimation of the elasticity of average employee hourly compensation with respect to changes in firm performance. This performance elasticity indicates the degree of alignment between employee and shareholder objectives, and it can also be interpreted as an incomplete residual income claim for employees. The estimated performance elasticity for the full sample of firms is not significantly different from a CEO salary-plus-bonus performance elasticity of 0.1 published in Coughlan and Schmidt [Journal of Accounting and Economics 7 (1985) 43]. Jensen and Murphy [Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990) 225] find that CEOs received approximately US$3.25 for each US$1000 increase in shareholder wealth. This translates to an elasticity of just over 57, but most of these payments come through channels other than salaries and bonuses. Jensen and Murphy report a performance sensitivity of salary and bonus payments for CEOs that is equivalent to analogous elasticities for rank and file workers reported in this paper. While the rewards CEOs receive through salary and bonus channels are larger than those of average employees in absolute terms, these rewards represent comparable fractions of income. This paper also finds differences in the pay-performance link based on firm size. The estimated performance elasticity is 0.197 in small firms and is indistinguishable from zero in large firms. The results indicate that firms use wage, salary and bonus adjustments to direct approximately 5.3% of firm value increases to employees. Although the precise link between pay and performance is not visible with this data, these results indicate that average employees benefit when the firm performs well.

This article examines employer demand for welfare recipients using new employer survey data. The results suggest that demand is high but sensitive to business cycle conditions. Factors including skill needs and industry affect prospective employer demand for recipients, while other characteristics that affect their relative supply to employers (e.g., establishment location) influence whether such demand is realized in actual hiring. The conditional demand for black and Hispanic welfare recipients lags behind their representation in the welfare population and seems affected by employers’ location and indicators of preferences. Thus, many demand‐side factors limit the employment options of welfare recipients, especially minorities.

A major criticism of corporate boards of directors is the absence of objectivity in appraising and monitoring management [The Business Lawyer, 48 (1992) 59–77]. Recently, Shivdasani and Yermack [Journal of Finance LIV (5) (1999) 1829] find that CEO involvement in board selection is associated with a greater proportion of gray and a lower proportion of outside director appointments. The question addressed here is whether corporate performance, as measured by Tobin's q, is affected by management influence in the board nominating process. Agrawal and Knoeber [Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 31 (3) (1996) 377] find interdependence among seven mechanisms to control agency problems between managers and stockholders. Their finding suggests that cross-sectional OLS regressions of firm performance on a single mechanism may be misleading and that interpretation of multiple regression methods is weakened by multicollinearity. In this study, a principal component analysis (PCA) is employed to mitigate such problems. An index of management involvement in director nomination is constructed for a sample of 106 firms from 1989 to 1992 via a PCA method utilizing selected governance mechanisms within the nominating process. We find a positive relationship between management participation in the director selection process and corporate performance.

This paper examines the effect of drug prohibition on the black market prices of cocaine and heroin. The paper examines the ratio of retail to farmgate price for cocaine, heroin, and several legal goods, and it compares legal versus black market prices for cocaine and heroin. The results suggest that cocaine and heroin are substantially more expensive than they would be in a legalized market, but to a lesser degree than suggested in previous research.