The article measures the impact of high school resources on women’s educational attainment and earnings. No link emerges between education and school resources—as measured by the pupil‐teacher ratio, spending per pupil, teachers’ starting salaries, or books per student. For white women, no significant connection between school resources and wages is found. But school inputs are in several cases significantly and positively related to black women’s wages. Wage elasticities with respect to school inputs are uniformly larger for black women. Finally, the impact of school resources on earnings remains constant or in some cases weakens as workers grow older.

In recent years, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and many journalists have argued that workers are more anxious about losing their jobs than they were in the past. I use the 1977‐96 General Social Survey to document trends in workers' beliefs about their own job security. During the 1990s, workers have been more pessimistic about losing their jobs in the next 12 months than workers were during the 1980s. Workers have also been more concerned about suffering future job loss that would have resulted in a decline in earnings or a spell of unemployment.

The article empirically estimates the effects of disability pensions provided under the Canada / Quebec Pension Plans on the labor-force participation rates of males aged 45-64 years. Two data sets are used. One consists of pooled cross section / annual time-series data by province for the years 1975-83. The other consists of observations as of 1985 on 651 males in the specified age group. Naive estimation results from both sets of data suggest a large negative effect of pension income. In the case of the micro data, this effect becomes small and statistically nonsignificant when more sophisticated estimation methods are used.

This article examines the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on the allocation of labor across industries. An overlooked aspect of UI is the effect of imperfect experience rating on hiring. Firms in more stable industries generally pay more into the UI system than their workers ever receive in benefits, thus subsidizing more volatile industries. The results indicate that industry employment shares are significantly affected by UI and that there is a net shift of resources from the service industry to the construction industry. The estimates also imply that layoff unemployment is increased by about 5% because of UI-induced employment shifts.

This paper describes changes in hours of work and income between 1959 and 1979 of women and men ages 25-64. It includes attempts to measure and value nonmarket production and leisure as well as market work, to take account of possible income sharing within households, and to allow for economies of scale in household production. The most important empirical result is that, relative to men, women's access to goods and services and leisure was lower in 1979 than in 1959. Changes in hourly earnings, hours of work, and household structure contributed to this result. The sex differential in hourly earnings is explored in detail.

R. Meager of University of New South Wales reviews “We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance” by Mara Kardas-Nelson. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores how microfinance, the practice of lending small amounts of money directly to people facing poverty, has impacted the lives of borrowers, highlighting the experiences of women in Sierra Leone who took out microfinance loans.”

This paper investigates the design of trade policies in an uncertain world. Governments in each of two countries select between direct quantity controls and subsidies in an attempt to shift profits in favour of domestic, imperfectly competitive firms. The equilibrium of this bilateral policy game depends critically on the variability of the environment. In a world of certainty, both governments would choose to regulate the behaviour of their firms through direct quantity controls. With a sufficient amount of uncertainty, both governments regulate their firms through subsidies. This result reflects an important tradeoff between the strategic advantages of direct quantity controls and flexibility gained by the use of subsidies

This study is a sequel to an earlier computer simulation of foreign accounting principles, the results of which were published in the Autumn, 1966 issue of this journal.' In the present study, the actual transaction data of two U.S. manufacturing firms, the same data that had been used previously for a multinational comparison, were used in a computer model to simulate prevailing U.S. and German Accounting practices. The aim was to obtain some notion of the different effects of U.S. and West German accounting practices on financial statements, assuming the underlying transactions are the same. The study is divided into five parts:

In this article we develop a model to analyze patent-protected R&D investment projects when there is (imperfect) competition in the development and marketing of the resulting product. The competitive interactions that occur substantially complicate the solution of the problem since the decision maker has to take into account not only the factors that affect her/his own decisions, but also the factors that affect the decisions of the other investors. The real options framework utilized to deal with investments under uncertainty is extended to incorporate the game theoretic concepts required to deal with these interactions. Implementation of the model shows that competition in R&D, in general, not only increases production and reduces prices, but also shortens the time of developing the product and increases the probability of a successful development. These benefits to society are countered by increased total investment costs in R&D and lower aggregate value of the R&D investment projects.