We investigate the source of information advantage in inter-dealer FX trading using data on trades and counter-party identities. In liquid dollar exchange rates, information is concentrated among dealers that trade most frequently and specialize their activity in a particular rate. In cross-rates, traders that engage in triangular arbitrage are best informed. Better-informed traders are also located on larger trading floors. In cross-rates, the ability to forecast flows explains all of the advantage of the triangular arbitrageurs. In liquid dollar rates, specialist traders can forecast both order-flow and the component of exchange rate changes that is uncorrelated with flow.

This article reexamines the negative seniority‐earnings relationship for academic economists. The empirical results show that the anomalous negative seniority effect found in earlier academic market studies holds in the absence of direct measures of research productivity. The negative effect, however, eventually disappears as more comprehensive measures of publishing, citations, and other productivity measures are included in the wage equation to control for the quantity and quality of faculty productivity. Faculty with greater seniority appear to be rewarded relatively less simply because many have been relatively less productive than their colleagues with less seniority at similar stages in their careers.

In 2001 a large and sustained supply shock halted a heroin epidemic in Australia. We use drug offenses to identify individual opioid users and examine how the shock affected their mortality risks and criminal activity over the next eight years. Initially, gains from fewer overdoses are offset by drug substitution and more crime, including homicides. Most adverse effects dissipate over time, whereas persistent mortality reductions save the lives of around one in 48 individuals in our sample. Our results demonstrate that reducing the supply of illicit opioids can lead to meaningful longer-term improvements, even when the short-term effects are ambiguous.

We document a within-month mortality cycle where deaths decline before the first day of the month and spike after the first. This cycle is present across a wide variety of causes and demographic groups. A similar cycle exists for a range of economic activities, suggesting the mortality cycle may be due to short-term variation in levels of economic activity. We provide evidence that the within-month activity cycle is generated by liquidity. Our results suggest a causal pathway whereby liquidity problems reduce activity, which in turn reduces mortality. These relationships may help explain the procyclical nature of mortality.

Individual food consumption data are used to examine three issues. First, is food consumption linked intertemporally at the individual level? Second, does the association between current and past consumption reflect habit or heterogeneity? Third, what do the estimates imply about the intertemporal elasticity of substitution? The authors find that habit matters, that controlling for heterogeneity reduces estimated habit effects, and that the product of the estimated intertemporal elasticity of substitution and the risk aversion parameter is less than one. These results all lead to rejection of time separable specifications of intertemporal consumption behavior. Copyright 1996 by MIT Press.

W. Kip Viscusi, Michael J. Moore, Workers' Compensation: Wage Effects, Benefit Inadequacies, and the Value of Health Losses, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 69, No. 2 (May, 1987), pp. 249-261

To what extent has the increased supply by government of certain union-like services reduced the demand for union membership and thereby contributed to the decline in trade union density? The existing empirical evidence is meager and conflicting. The puropse of our paper is to reexamine the government substitution hypothesis, specifically with respect to the relationship between government welfare spending and union density. We test the hypothesis with time-series data using three alternative models of union growth. The advantage of this approach is that it will permit an assessment of how sensitive the results are to both specification and sample period changes. In all, we find the time-series evidence of a negative welfare effect on union density to be mixed. Copyright 1989 by MIT Press.

Product liability ideally should promote efficient levels of product safety, but misdirected liability efforts may depress beneficial innovations. This paper examines these competing effects of liability costs on product R & D intensity and new product introductions by manufacturing firms. At low to moderate levels of expected liability costs, there is a positive effect of liability costs on product innovation. At very high levels of liability costs, the effect is negative. At the sample mean, liability costs increase R & D intensity by 15 percent. The greater linkage of these effects to product R & D rather than process R & D is consistent with the increased prominence of the design defect doctrine.

We propose the rise of crack cocaine markets as a key explanation for the end to the convergence in black-white educational outcomes in the United States that began in the mid-1980s. After constructing a measure to date the arrival of crack markets in cities and states, we show that the decline in educational outcomes for black males begins with the start of the crack epidemic. We also show that there are higher murder and incarceration rates after the arrival of crack cocaine and that these are predictive of lower black high school completion rates, a result consistent with human capital theory. We estimate that effects related to crack markets can account for approximately 40% to 70% of the fall in black male high school completion rates.