Institutional investors have become more active in corporate governance with the relaxation of Depression Era securities laws. The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) is a leading institutional activist. In this paper, we examine the relationship between CalPERS' public targeting and both short- and long-term stock returns to address what has been dubbed the “CalPERS effect.” Our results indicate evidence of an announcement effect and that, while there is also evidence of some long-term improvement, it is limited to 6 months from the announcement of the target list in the Wall Street Journal when more consistent empirical methodologies are employed.

The role of technology in the transition from premodem, Malthusian to modem economies in late 18thand 19th-century Europe is among the major questions in economic history, but it is still poorly understood. In particular, the view that premodern societies experienced low labor productivity and stagnant living standards, and that technological change before ca. 1800 was close to zero due to pervasive guild rent-seeking and poorly specified property rights to knowledge (Douglass C. North, 1981; Joel Mokyr, 2002), is hard to square with the fact that the surge of technological innovation in the 18th century occurred within institutional frameworks not too dissimilar to those of 1300.

This paper shows how the demand for non-life insurance interacts with consumption and saving. The analysis is set in continuous time, using the maximum principle. When insurance is actuarially fair, the insurance and consumption decisions are separable. With loaded premiums, and alternatively without insurance, optimal consumption is dynamically related to the growth rate of the loss probability, and a growing loss probability generates precautionary saving. With loaded premiums, less than full insurance is demanded at each instant, and optimal cover varies over time, whether or not the loss probability is constant.

Does investor protection foster economic growth? To assess the widely held affirmative view, we introduce investor protection into a standard overlapping generations model of capital accumulation. Better investor protection implies better risk sharing. Because of entrepreneurs' risk aversion, this results in a larger demand for capital. This is the demand effect. A second effect (the supply effect) follows from general equilibrium restrictions. Better protection (i.e., higher demand) increases the interest rate and lowers the income of entrepreneurs, decreasing current savings and next period's supply of capital. The supply effect is stronger the tighter are the restrictions on capital flows. Our model thus predicts that the (positive) effect of investor protection on growth is stronger for countries with lower restrictions. Cross-country data provide support for this prediction, as does the detailed examination of the growth experiences of South Korea and India.

I estimate adjustment costs for labor and capital from the Euler equations for factor demand. For both factors, I find relatively strong evidence against substantial adjustment costs. My estimates use annual data from two-digit industries. My results support the view that rents arising from adjustment costs are relatively small and are not an important part of the explanation of the large movements of the values of corporations in relation to the reproduction costs of their capital. I investigate the potential effects of three types of specification error: (1) aggregation over time, (2) aggregation over firms with heterogeneous demand shocks, and (3) estimation of a convex adjustment-cost technology in the presence of nonconvex discrete adjustment costs. I find that the likely biases from these specification errors are relatively small. I.

We investigate whether the financial riskiness of large U.S. audit firm clienteles varied with the changing audit litigation liability environment during the period 1975‐99. Partitioning the period of study into four distinct periods (a benchmark period (1975‐84), a period of increasing concerns about litigation liability (1985‐89), a period of lobbying for reform (1990‐94), and a post‐relief period (1995‐99)), we find some evidence of risk decreases during 1985‐89, strong evidence of risk decreases during 1990‐94, and strong evidence of risk increases during 1995‐99. However, we also find that over the period of our study, a time during which Big 6 market shares grew appreciably, the proportion of litigious‐industry clients in Big 6 client portfolios grew at about the same rate as the proportion of such clients in the population. Moreover, the Big 6 share of the financially riskiest clients in the economy did not grow as fast as the overall Big 6 market share. In sum, although our evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the riskiness of Big 6 client portfolios responded to changes in the audit litigation liability environment, we find no systematic evidence of a "race to the bottom" or "bottom fishing" by these firms in a bid to increase their market shares.

The relationship between international payments and the real exchange rate-the transfer problem-is a classic question in international economics. We use cross-country data on real exchange rates and a newly constructed data set on countries' net external positions to shed new light on this question. We present a simple theoretical framework that leads to testable implications for the long-run comovements of real exchange rates, net foreign assets, relative GDP and terms of trade, and cross-country and time series evidence on the subject. We show that on average countries with net external liabilities have more depreciated real exchange rates, and that the main channel of transmission seems to be the relative price of nontraded goods, rather than the relative price of traded goods, across countries.

Prior to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, many U.S. states restructured their regulatory framework by replacing rate-of-return regulation with competition in both the local exchange service and local long-distance markets and adopting price regulation (price caps and price freezes). Using a panel data set of incumbent firm prices for three services, I investigate whether price regulation and differences in entry conditions affect incumbent operators' rate structures. I find that competition has prompted a significant amount of rate rebalancing by reducing the amount of cross-subsidization present in local telephone markets. In addition, the added flexibility of price cap regulation speeds the rate rebalance effects of competition.

Over fifty years ago, Abram Bergson, Janet Chapman, and others sought to assess the large gap in Soviet statistics between the published wage bill and the full wage bill; and Frank Lorimer drew attention to the related gap between the employment data in the 1939 population census and in the annual employment returns. Soviet archives which have recently been declassified reveal the considerable extent to which the findings of the Western authors were accurate.