This paper investigates systematic changes in the value-relevance of earnings and book values over time. We report three primary findings. First, contrary to claims in the professional literature, the combined value-relevance of earnings and book values has not declined over the past forty years and, in fact, appears to have increased slightly. Second, while the incremental value-relevance of ‘bottom line’ earnings has declined, it has been replaced by increasing value-relevance of book values. Finally, much of the shift in value-relevance fiom earnings to book values can be explained by the increasing frequency and magnitude of one-time items, the increasing frequency of negative earnings, and changes in average firm size and intangible intensity across time.

This paper incorporates the well-documented part-time/full-time wage differential into an empirical labor supply model with both a heterogeneity- and a random-error term and estimates that model for women in the United States. Incorporation of the part-time/full-time wage differential results in a unique discontinuous, nonconvex budget set, and the consideration of estimation procedures previously unconfronted in the nonlinear budget constraint literature. The full structural representation of the budget constraint is shown to “fit” better than the alternative models estimated, and to yield a predicted hours distribution representative of actual hours.

This paper examines the wealth mobility of a panel of mature American men between 1966 and 1981. Although greater persistence exists than within the income distribution, a sizeable degree of movement within the wealth distribution is observed. Slightly more than half of the households changed quintiles. However, the magnitude of the movement was modest, with 78% of the moves to an adjacent quintile. Movements into either extreme of the wealth distribution were relatively rare. Really big moves, from the poorest to richest group, were extremely rare, with the probability of a black making such a move within fifteen years approximately zero.

This paper reassesses a finding by Martin Prachowny (1993) that the value of the Okun coefficient for the United States (linking unemployment changes to output changes) is only around −0.67 rather than around the more typical value of −2.25. Using a cointegration framework, and the same data sets as Prachowny, we find, for one of the data sets, that the Okun coefficient is much closer to a value of −2.25, which supports previous research work.

We examine market efficiency before and after the 1987 Market Crash using the box spread strategy implemented with European-style S&P 500 Index (SPX) options. Before the Crash, apparent arbitrage opportunities were rare and simulated trades were unprofitable assuming a one-minute execution delay. After the Crash, apparent arbitrage opportunities were frequent and simulated trades were profitable even assuming a five-minute execution delay. Our analysis makes the routine assumption that quotes are good until updated to construct a time series of prevailing quotes sampled at 30-second intervals. If this assumption is valid, then arbitrage profits were actually available. If this assumption is invalid, then such profits could have been illusory. Either scenario, however, implies that SPX market efficiency decreased following the Crash—prevailing price quotes repeatedly failed to satisfy the fundamental parity relation underlying the box spread.

This paper deals with the evaluation of some public employment policies set up in France during the 1980's to improve the labour market prospects of unskilled young workers. The evaluation implemented in this paper is restricted to the impact of such public measures on durations and outcomes of subsequent spells of unemployment and employment. The econometric study is conducted with non-experimental longitudinal microdata recording individual labour market histories. A particular attention is paid to the differential effects of various types of measures, according to the educational level of recipients. Programmes involving a higher level of on-the-job training, such as alternating work/training programmes in private firms, are principally beneficial to the less educated young workers. In contrast, for more educated young workers, “work fare” programmes in the public sector decrease the intensity of transition from the subsequent unemployment spell to regular jobs; for that subgroup, “work fare” programmes may act as a signal of low employment performance.

[This paper examines experienced managers' judgments about the effects of market price and accounting profit information on negotiated transfer prices. Conventional economic arguments predict that market price should determine negotiated transfer prices by determining reservation prices for parties with outside options. We found, however, that experienced managers expected the influence of market price to be limited by divisional managers' concern about how their profits compare with each other. While market price did affect managers' reservation-price and transfer-price estimates, its influence was significantly less when market price resulted in a more unequal ("unfair") distribution of profits between divisions. Profit comparisons also affected the judgments that determine the efficiency of the bargaining process. We found that as market price diverged from a price that offered equal profits to both divisions, both variance and bias in managers' price estimates increased, indicating that it would be harder to reach agreement on a transfer price.]

In this paper we analyze transition data by means of the minimum-chi-square (MCS) method instead of the more commonly used maximum-likelihood (ML) method. The analysis includes exits to multiple destinations and unmeasured heterogeneity. In the empirical application, turnover in the welfare system in Belgium is found to be very high. Median duration is 4.5 months for men and 7 months for women, although these figures overstate turnover in that exits out of welfare include those occurring as a consequence of recipients moving to another municipality while remaining on welfare.

No. This paper investigates the relationship between financing constraints and investment-cash flow sensitivities by analyzing the firms identified by Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen as having unusually high investment-cash flow sensitivities. We find that firms that appear less financially constrained exhibit significantly greater sensitivities than firms that appear more financially constrained. We find this pattern for the entire sample period, subperiods, and individual years. These results (and simple theoretical arguments) suggest that higher sensitivities cannot be interpreted as evidence that firms are more financially constrained. These findings call into question the interpretation of most previous research that uses this methodology.

This is a critical evaluation of the state of the art in International Finance. Several points of reference are selected: The Mundell–Fleming–Branson (MFP) paradigm, the monetary model with purchasing power parity (PPP) as a long run anchor, the representative agent approach and the natural real exchange rate (NATREX) model. Their strengths and weaknesses are identified from both a theoretical and empirical point of view. We conclude with a suggestion of what is a fruitful explanation of medium to longer run movements in the real exchange rate and the current account.