We organize an empirical analysis of Russian wage arrears around hypotheses concerning incentives for firms to pay late and for workers to tolerate late payment. Nationally representative household panel data matched with employer data show that arrears are positively related to firm age, size, state ownership, and declining performance. Constrained multinomial logit estimates reveal intrafirm variation related to job tenure and small shareholdings in the firm. Wage arrears, unlike wage cuts, have a theoretically ambiguous effect on workers' quit behavior, and we show empirically that the effect varies negatively with the extent of the practice in the local labor market.

This paper analyzes both theoretically and empirically how an absolute grading standard that allows only a small number of distinct grades affects student course performance outcomes. The clearest prediction of the model is that course performance of “grade-motivated” students will tend to be clustered slightly above the boundaries that separate grades, as long as the variance of the random component of performance is not too large. A more tenuous prediction is that the proximity of a grade-motivated student to a grade boundary going into the final exam should influence final exam performance, after controlling for prefinal exam performance. An empirical investigation of the course performance of university students who were enrolled in introductory economics classes that used an absolute grading standard finds evidence in favor of both of these predictions. The results suggest that student effort decisions respond to the incentives created by the grading system.

A model in which women search for husbands characterized by their wages predicts increasing within-group male wage inequality, raises the expected value of continued marital search, and so lowers female marriage propensities. Using 1970, 1980, and 1990 census data, I test this hypothesis within geographically, racially, and educationally defined marriage markets. The estimates suggest rising male wage inequality accounted for 7% to 18% of the decline in the propensity to marry between 1970 and 1990 for white women and more-educated black women. Growing wage inequality appears to have had little effect on the marriage behavior of less-educated black women.

Using a unique dataset based on daily and hourly high-yield bond transaction prices, we find the informational efficiency of corporate bond prices is similar to that of the underlying stocks. We find that stocks do not lead bonds in reflecting firm-specific information. We further examine price behavior around earnings news and find that information is quickly incorporated into both bond and stock prices, even at short return horizons. Finally, we find that measures of market quality are no poorer for the bonds in our sample than for the underlying stocks.

Capital market participants collectively may possess information about the valuation implications of a firm's change in strategy not known by the management of the firm proposing the change. We ask whether a firm's management can exploit the capital market's information in deciding either whether to proceed with a contemplated strategy change or whether to continue with a previously initiated strategy change. In the case of a proposed strategy change, we show that managers can extract the capital market's information by announcing a potential new strategy, and then conditioning the decision to implement the new strategy on the size of the market's price reaction to the announcement. Under this arrangement, we show that a necessary condition to implement all and only positive net present value strategy changes is that managers proceed to implement some strategies that garner negative price reactions upon their announcement. In the case of deciding whether to continue with a previously implemented strategy change, we show that it may be optimal for the firm to predicate its abandonment/continuation decision on the magnitude of the costs it has already incurred. Thus, what looks like “sunk‐cost” behavior may in fact be optimal. Both demonstrations show that, in addition to performing their usual role of anticipating future cash flows generated by a manager's actions, capital market prices can also be used to direct a manager's actions. It follows that, in contrast to the usual depiction of the information flows between capital markets and firms as being one way — from firms to the capital markets — information also flows from capital markets to firms.

This article uses a new dataset of credit card accounts to analyze credit card delinquency, personal bankruptcy, and the stability of credit risk models. We estimate duration models for default and assess the relative importance of different variables in predicting default. We investigate how the propensity to default has changed over time, disentangling the two leading explanations for the recent increase in default rates—a deterioration in the risk composition of borrowers versus an increase in borrowers’ willingness to default due to declines in default costs. Even after controlling for risk composition and economic fundamentals, the propensity to default significantly increased between 1995 and 1997. Standard default models missed an important time-varying default factor, consistent with a decline in default costs.

This article uses a new dataset of credit card accounts to analyze credit card delinquency, personal bankruptcy, and the stability of credit risk models. We estimate duration models for default and assess the relative importance of different variables in predicting default. We investigate how the propensity to default has changed over time, disentangling the two leading explanations for the recent increase in default rates-a deterioration in the risk composition of borrowers versus an increase in borrowers' willingness to default due to declines in default costs. Even after controlling for risk composition and economic fundamentals, the propensity to default significantly increased between 1995 and 1997. Standard default models missed an important time-varying default factor, consistent with a decline in default costs.

This is an exploration of how bidding behavior of firms in various auctions is affected by their capital structure. The theoretical model considers a first-price sealed bid and an English auction. We find that as debt levels increase, firms tend to reduce their bids. The lower bids give the competition incentives to reduce their bids as well. These results are investigated empirically using data from the 1994-1995 FCC spectrum auctions. Consistent with the theoretical model, higher debt levels of the bidding firm and of the competition tend to lead to lower bids. Additional determinants of bidding behavior in these auctions are also analyzed.