Anecdotes are often quite suggestive. A graduate student in economics who was serving as a teaching assistant once reported that his major professor came into his office and told him that he was spending too much of his time helping his undergraduate students and not enough time on his research. Was the professor expressing a preference for time spent on teaching over research? Or was the professor suggesting to the student that the academic market rewards research more than teaching? Regardless, the underlying message that gets transferred from such an experience, as early as graduate education and perhaps throughout a career, is that teaching is not as important or valuable as research. Such strong conclusions, however, should not be based on anecdotal evidence. Whether economics professors are less interested in teaching and more interested in research is an empirical question worthy of study. Although teaching and research choices made by economics faculty members reflect both preferences and choice sets, in this study we focus on preferences and use a national survey to compare the teaching and research views of economists with faculty members in other major disciplines.

Executives can only impact firm outcomes if they have influence over crucial decisions. On the basis of this idea, we develop and test the hypothesis that firms whose CEOs have more decision-making power should experience more variability in performance. Focusing primarily on the power the CEO has over the board and other top executives as a consequence of his formal position and titles, status as a founder, and status as the board's sole insider, we find that stock returns are more variable for firms run by powerful CEOs. Our findings suggest that the interaction between executive characteristics and organizational variables has important consequences for firm performance.

We analyze intercorporate asset sales where equity is the means of payment, and compare the results to cash asset sales. Equity deals are value‐enhancing for both buyers, 10%, and sellers, 3%, while cash sales generate seller returns of 1.9% and buyer returns that are not significant. Combined wealth gains are large for equity deals, but modest for cash deals. Equity‐based asset sales are not a precursor to consolidations between buyers and sellers, and do not affect buyer openness to the takeover market. We conclude that the use of buyer equity conveys favorable information about the value of assets and buyers.

Employment relationships provide fertile ground for both employee and employer opportunism. Employers worry about whether employees will devote sufficient effort to work, and employees are concerned about whether employers will compensate them appropriately. In this paper, we examine whether employer discretion over the size of the total employee compensation pool and the allocation of this pool among employees influences employee and employer opportunism. The results of our experiment indicate that firm output and employees' compensation are greater when the employer does not have discretion over total employee compensation, but does have discretion over the allocation of total compensation. We find that the employer's residual profit increases with discretion over the allocation of compensation among employees; however, we find no effect on residual profit of the employer's discretion over the total amount of employee compensation. Our results suggest that firms benefit from a compensation contract that establishes total employee compensation as a predetermined function of public, aggregate measures such as accounting income, but provides the employer at least some discretion to allocate this compensation using private information. However, our results caution that employees and employers may not have similar preferences for the degree of employer discretion over the determination of total employee compensation.

The Volume-Outcome Effect, Scale Economies, and Learning-by-Doing by Martin Gaynor, Harald Seider and William B. Vogt. Published in volume 95, issue 2, pages 243-247 of American Economic Review, May 2005

This study classifies analysts' earnings forecasts as herding or bold and finds that (1) boldness likelihood increases with the analyst's prior accuracy, brokerage size, and experience and declines with the number of industries the analyst follows, consistent with theory linking boldness with career concerns and ability; (2) bold forecasts are more accurate than herding forecasts; and (3) herding forecast revisions are more strongly associated with analysts' earnings forecast errors (actual earnings—forecast) than are bold forecast revisions. Thus, bold forecasts incorporate analysts' private information more completely and provide more relevant information to investors than herding forecasts.

We develop a performance evaluation approach in which a fund manager's skill is judged by the extent to which the manager's investment decisions resemble the decisions of managers with distinguished performance records. The proposed performance measures use historical returns and holdings of many funds to evaluate the performance of a single fund. Simulations demonstrate that our measures are particularly useful in ranking managers. In an application that relies on such ranking, our measures reveal strong predictability in the returns of U.S. equity funds. Our measures provide information about future fund returns that is not contained in the standard measures.

Acquiring‐firm shareholders lost 12 cents around acquisition announcements per dollar spent on acquisitions for a total loss of $240 billion from 1998 through 2001, whereas they lost $7 billion in all of the 1980s, or 1.6 cents per dollar spent. The 1998 to 2001 aggregate dollar loss of acquiring‐firm shareholders is so large because of a small number of acquisitions with negative synergy gains by firms with extremely high valuations. Without these acquisitions, the wealth of acquiring‐firm shareholders would have increased. Firms that make these acquisitions with large dollar losses perform poorly afterward.

This study investigates the effect of firms' adoption of SFAS No. 131 segment disclosure rules on the stock market's ability to predict the firms' earnings, as captured by the forward earnings response coefficient (FERC). The FERC is the association between current-year returns and next-year earnings. SFAS No. 131, effective for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 1997, arguably increased both the quantity and quality of segment disclosure. Consistent with the standard's intended qualitative effects, pre-131 multi-segment firms experienced a significant increase in FERC after adopting SFAS No. 131. Consistent with the standard's intended quantitative effects, many pre-131 single-segment firms began disclosing multiple segments, and those that did experienced an increase in FERC. However, pre-131 single-segment firms that remained single segment (i.e., were unaffected by SFAS No. 131) had no change in FERC, indicating that the increase in FERC for 131-affected firms is not due to some other event concurrent to the adoption of SFAS No. 131. These results are robust under numerous procedures that control for characteristics of the sample firms and their earnings, providing strong evidence that SFAS No. 131 resulted in an increase in stock price informativeness for affected firms. Thus, we provide the first empirical price-based evidence that SFAS No. 131 provided more information (about future earnings) to the market, as the standard's proponents have suggested.

We examine whether mandating banks to issue subordinated debt would enhance market monitoring and control risk taking. To evaluate whether subordinated debt enhances risk monitoring, we extract the credit‐spread curve for each banking firm in our sample and examine whether changes in credit spreads reflect changes in bank risk variables, after controlling for changes in market and liquidity variables. We do not find strong and consistent evidence that they do. To evaluate whether subordinated debt controls risk taking, we examine whether the first issue of subordinated debt changes the risk‐taking behavior of a bank. We find that it does not.