Exports require significant up-front costs in product design, marketing, and distribution. These are intangible, firm-specific investments that are likely difficult to finance externally. We argue that a developed financial system can therefore facilitate exports. We test this prediction and find support for it. First, financial development is associated with more exports in industries in which fixed costs are high as well as to importers that require high costs. Second, trade dynamics are affected by financial development. In countries with better finance, exports are more sensitive to exchange rates. Finally, we predict and document that countries with more developed finance experience more volatile exports. (JEL F14, F36, G20, G30)

Previous estimates of the effects of the Seattle and Denver income maintenance experiments on labor supply indicate that persons eligible for experimental payments reduced their work effort by appreciable amounts. However, these estimates have all been based on data that were self-reported during interviews by participants in the experiment. This paper investigates whether the estimates are biased by differences between treatment and control groups in reporting accuracy. Our results, which utilize employer-reported information on participants' work effort, suggest that the experiment's effects on several categories of Seattle and Denver participants were less adverse than estimates based on self-reported interview data imply.

Auditing, Audit fees, Auditor Low balling, Auditor change

The authors introduce and analyze 'multistage situations, ' which generalize 'multistage games' (which, in turn, generalize 'repeated games'). One reason for this generalization is to avoid the perhaps unrealistic constraints--inherent to noncooperative games--that the set of strategy tuples must be a Cartesian product of the strategy sets of the players. Another reason is that, in most economic and social activities (e.g., in sequential bargaining without a rigid protocol), the 'rules of the game' are rather amorphous; the procedures are rarely pinned down. Such social environments can, however, be represented as multistage situations and be effectively analyzed through the theory of social situations. Copyright 1996 by The Econometric Society.

Abstract Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the United States: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We exploit the staggered integration of women into combat units to estimate the causal effects of the introduction of female colleagues on men’s job performance, behavior, and perceptions of workplace quality, using monthly administrative personnel records and rich survey responses. We find that integrating women into previously all-male units does not negatively affect men’s performance or behavioral outcomes, including retention, promotions, demotions, separations for misconduct, criminal investigations, and medical conditions. Most of our results are precise enough to rule out small detrimental effects. However, there is a wedge between men’s perceptions and performance. The integration of women causes a negative shift in male soldiers’ perceptions of workplace quality. The decline is driven by units integrated with female officers, likely arising from female officers increasing men’s awareness of workplace problems or from men’s dissatisfaction from working with women in positions of authority—even though men in such units show some performance gains. If male-dominated workplaces are reluctant to incorporate women due to expectations that men will become less productive, our paper provides evidence to weigh against that notion.