The importance of skilled labor and the inalienability of human capital expose firms to the risk of losing talent at critical times. Using Swedish microdata, we document that firms lose workers with the highest cognitive and noncognitive skills as they approach bankruptcy. In a quasi‐experiment, we confirm that financial distress drives these results: following a negative export shock caused by exogenous currency movements, talent abandons the firm, but only if the exporter is highly leveraged. Consistent with talent dependence being associated with higher labor costs of financial distress, firms that rely more on talent have more conservative capital structures.

In August 1999, U.S. exchanges began to compete directly for order flow in many options that had been exclusively listed on another exchange, shifting 37% of option volume to multiple‐listing status by the end of September. Effective and quoted bid–ask spreads decrease significantly after multiple listings with spreads generally maintaining their initial lower levels 1 year later. These results hold for both time series and pooled regressions and are robust. We reject that economies of scale in market making cause the decrease in spreads and support the view that interexchange competition reduces option transaction costs.

In this study, we examine how information foraging by auditors affects audit evidence collection in two distinct contexts, and show how a small change to audit methodology mitigates the potentially harmful effects of foraging. Information Foraging Theory explains how, while navigating an information environment, individuals learn to acquire information through personally experiencing the costs incurred and the values obtained from information. Consistent with the theory, we find that auditors react to the immediately felt costs of information collection (e.g., time and effort) at the expense of a more global consideration of information value (i.e., auditors collect lower-quality audit evidence). However, foraging behavior is moderated by removing the personal cost to the individual auditor (identifying audit evidence for another member of the audit team to collect), further demonstrating that these personally felt costs influence auditor choices in a way that reduces the quality of information collected. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating how information foraging can influence evidence quality and, thus, audit quality, and how a slight alteration of audit methodology can mitigate this behavior.

We investigate how the tone of sell-side debt analysts' discussions about debt-equity conflict events affects the informativeness of debt analysts' reports in debt markets. Conflict events such as mergers and acquisitions, debt issuance, share repurchases, or dividend payments potentially generate asset substitution or wealth expropriation by equity holders. We document that debt analysts routinely discuss these conflict events in their reports. More importantly, discussions about conflict events that we code as negative are associated with increases in credit spreads and bond trading volume. Consistent with the informational value of debt analysts' discussions in secondary debt markets, we find that negatively coded conflict discussions predict higher bond offering yields in the primary bond market. In additional analyses, we measure the tone of debt analysts' discussions based on their disagreement with the tone of equity analysts' discussions and find that the informativeness of debt analysts' reports is higher when our coding indicates that conflict events are viewed negatively by debt analysts but positively by equity analysts.

This article presents the findings of the report of the committee, appointed by President Charles J. Gaa as a task committee operating under the Joint Committee on Education, to receive and review the Ford and Carnegie reports for the American Accounting Association. The two reports--"Higher Education for Business" by Gordon and Howell, and "The Education of American Businessmen" by Pierson were financed and sponsored by The Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York respectively. The authors of Ford and Carnegie reports, in their extensive surveys found glaring examples of bachelor's degrees given for programs of study, overloaded with business in general or with accounting in particular. The Committee urges that the faculty of each school should read the entire reports so that by carefully trying on each shoe of criticism they may find those, which fit their particular situations. It is also expected that the Ford and Carnegie reports will have an impact on collegiate education for business.

In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for Medicaid. This lottery provides an opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use, financial strain, and health of low-income adults using a randomized controlled design. In the year after random assignment, the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected. We find that in this first year, the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization (including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations), lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt (including fewer bills sent to collection), and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group.

In 1940 the labor force participation rate for married women, husband present, was 14 percent. By 1970 it had increased 26 percentage points to 40 percent. The supply and demand variables associated with this increase have been widely investigated. However, there has been ve'ry little research on the economic effects of wives' labor force participation. (See R. Agarwala and J. Drinkwater, Margaret Carroll, Robert Holbrook and Frank Stafford, Lucy Mallan and Jacob Mincer.) This paper analyzes two economic effects: the effect on the ratio of consumption to income (CIY) and the effect on the ratio of durable goods purchases to income (DurlY). The primary question addressed is: Controlling for total family income and several other variables, what are the differences (if any) in the ratios of CIY and DurlY for working-wife (W-W) and nonworking wife (N-W-W) families? Looked at in another way, the question may be rephrased: How do W-W families use wives' income?

We often deal with uncertain events for which no probabilities are known. Several normative models have been proposed. Descriptive studies have usually been qualitative, or they estimated ambiguity aversion through one single number. This paper introduces the source method, a tractable method for quantitatively analyzing uncertainty empirically. The theoretical key is the distinction between different sources of uncertainty, within which subjective (choice-based) probabilities can still be defined. Source functions convert those subjective probabilities into willingness to bet. We apply our method in an experiment, where we do not commit to particular ambiguity attitudes but let the data speak.