The 1940's were a turning point in married women's labor-force participation, leading many to credit World War II with spurring economic and social change. This paper uses two retrospective surveys, from 1944 and 1951, to show that half of all married women employed in 1950 were working in 1940, and more than half of the decade's new entrants joined after the war. Of all wartime entrants, the majority exited after 1944 but before 1950. The war had several significant indirect impacts on women's employment, but its direct influence appears to have been more modest.

This work examines the relation between option prices and the true, as opposed to risk-neutral, distribution of the underlying asset. If the underlying asset follows a diffusion with an instantaneous expected return at least as large as the instantaneous risk-free rate, observed option prices can be used to place bounds on the moments of the true distribution. An illustration of the paper's results is provided by the analysis of the information concerning the mean and standard deviation of market returns contained in the prices of S&P 100 Index Options.

[We examine the volatility implications of around-the-clock foreign exchange trading with transaction data on futures contracts from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the London International Financial Futures Exchange. We find higher U.S.-European and U.S.-Japanese exchange-rate volatilities during U.S. trading hours and higher European cross-rate volatilities during European trading hours. While the disclosure of private information through trading may partly explain these volatility patterns, we conclude that the increased volatility is more likely driven by macroeconomic news announcements. An analysis of inter- and intraday data also reveals that volatility increases at times that coincide with the release of U.S. macroeconomic news.]

Friedman's (1960) proposal to pay interest on (required) reserves is considered in a setting that eliminates the indeterminacy of steady-state equilibrium discussed by Sargent and Wallace (1985). In an overlapping-generations model where the real rate of interest is technologically determined, the payment of interest on reserves results in a determinate, Pareto optimal steady-state equilibrium. However, interest payments on reserves reduce the steady-state welfare of all young agents and, for many economies, result in the existence of stationary sunspot equilibria. This is the case even if such equilibria cannot exist when reserves do not earn interest.

We establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws. Individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age, and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year. Roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws. We estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education. The instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate, suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates.