This paper overcomes the long-standing problem of measuring motor carriers' service quality by utilizing service quality data collected from shippers. A service quality controlled cost function is estimated for a sample of less-than-truckload motor carriers. It is shown that excluding service quality variables from cost estimation significantly underestimates carriers' scale economies. These scale economies enable large carriers to offer higher quality services at competitive or even lower costs than small carriers. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Existing empirical studies of the put-call parity condition report frequent, substantial violations. An important problem in interpreting these results is that these studies all investigate American options. While some of these studies attempt to reduce the effects of possible early exercise on their tests, they cannot fully account for the effect of early exercise. Therefore, it is not possible to conclude from these studies whether, or to what extent, observed put-call parity violations are due to market inefficiency or due to the value of early exercise. We avoid the early exercise problem by testing put-call parity using European options. We find violations that are much less frequent and smaller than the studies using American options. Moreover, these violations reflect premia for liquidity (immediacy) risk.

Using confidential data of executive-specific short-term bonus plans, we investigate the extent to which executives manipulate earnings to maximize the present value of bonus plan payments. As such, this paper extends the work of Healy (1985). Like Healy, we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that managers manipulate earnings downwards when their bonuses are at their maximum. Unlike Healy, we find no evidence that managers manipulate earnings downwards when earnings are below the minimum necessary to receive any bonus. We demonstrate that Healy's results at the lower bound are likely to be induced by his methodology.

We examine whether the structure of compensation for the divisional CEO is related to subsequent innovative activity within the division, and whether the divisional CEO's compensation is structured as a function of the expected innovation opportunity set facing the division. Both the expected innovation opportunity set and the divisional executive's compensation contract are treated as endogenous variables by adopting a simultaneous equation approach. We find modest evidence that the proportion of total compensation tied to long-term components has a positive relation with future innovation, but no evidence that this proportion has a positive relation with the expected innovation opportunity set.

Economists commonly estimate the value of characteristics not traded in explicit markets by hedonic pricing. Unfortunately, these nonexplicitly traded characteristics often display a lack of independent variation or multicollinearity. Often some prior information on the value of these characteristics is available from submarkets. This paper utilizes this type of prior information to circumvent multicollinearity problems in hedonic pricing models using an inequality restricted Bayesian estimator. The authors perform a Monte Carlo experiment and cross-validation analysis to demonstrate the superiority of inequality restricted Bayesian over ordinary least squares at many margins in a variety of situations typically faced in hedonic estimation. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.