[Simunic [1980] and Palmrose [1986, Appendix A] report contradictory findings about a Big Eight auditor price premium in the "small" auditee segment of the U.S. audit market for publicly-traded companies. The study reported here finds that a Big Eight price premium exists and that the premium exists with respect to both second-tier national firms and local/regional firms. The existence of a price premium implies Big Eight product differentiation, at least in the "small" auditee market segment. A separate test is made of initial audit engagements. Tests indicate that initial engagements are priced significantly lower than continuing engagements, which supports recent reports of price-cutting behavior. However, no inference is made about the effect of price-cutting on audit quality.]

Reviews the book "Women in the Accounting Profession," by Shari H. Wescott and Robert E. Seiler.

Unlike most previous work, this paper examines the effect of right- to-work laws on flows into unionism through organizing rather than onthe stock of unionism. Organizing offers a far more sensitive indicator of the situa tion of unionism and allows the use of both cross-sectional and time-series methods to explore the impact of the passage of a right-to-work law. The authors find that right-to-work laws have a sizable initial impact on organizing that decay s over time. The effect holds up even when one uses fixed weights and causality tests.

Using an accelerated failure time model, the extended generalized gamma distribution is deployed to discriminate among various special cases of that distribution. Displaced worker data from the January 1984 Current Population Survey are analyzed within a regression framework that accommodates the stochastic nature of the point of censoring associated with incomplete spells of unemployment. Not only are the regression parameters sensitive to distributional assumption but also there is evidence of different distributional shapes and hence duration dependencies in subsets of the data.

This paper reviews a previously offered model of electricity load management containing uncertainties. This analysis allows individual customer demand to fluctuate within a billing period. Also, it allows diversity or imperfect correlation among customer demands. The behavioral effects are examined for a fuse that allows utilities and customers to incur costs or ration the loads under excess demand charges. The behavioral implication is that the demand price is effective at each instant of the billing period. The fuse analogy suggests that demand and energy prices be kept separate, and that behavior is best understood as a two-stage procedure.

Solomon W. Polachek, Phanindra V. Wunnava, Michael T. Hutchins, Panel Estimates of Union Effects on Wages and Wage Growth, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Aug., 1987), pp. 527-531

Simunic [1980] and Palmrose [1986, Appendix A] report contradictory findings about a Big Eight auditor price premium In the "small" auditee segment of the U.S. audit market for publicly-traded companies. The study reported here finds that a Big Eight price premium exists and that the premium exists with respect to both second-tier national firms and local/regional firms. The existence of a price premium Implies Big Eight product differentiation, at least in the "small" auditee market segment. A separate test is made of initial audit engagements. Tests indicate that initial engagements are priced significantly lower than continuing engagements, which supports recent reports of price-cutting behavior. However, no inference is made about the effect of price-cutting on audit quality.