Among U. S. industries where earnings rose relatively from 1979–1995, injury rates declined relatively. Obversely, during the 1960s narrowing interindustry wage differentials were associated with an increase in the relative risk of injury in high-wage industries. Evidence from the NLSY suggests similar results among full-time workers between 1988 and 1996. Between 1973 and 1991 the disamenity of evening/night work was increasingly borne by low-wage male workers. Changing earnings inequality has understated changing inequality in the returns to work. Assuming skill-neutral changes in the cost of reducing these disamenities, estimates of the implied income elasticities of demand for amenities are well above unity.

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Auditing, Auditor-Auditee interactions, Misstatements, Strategic behavior

This paper analyzes the daily labor supply behavior of food and beverage vendors at a single stadium over an entire baseball season. This labor market is attractive for the study of labor supply both because the vendors unilaterally decide whether to participate on each game date and because changes in product demand conditions across days are large and highly predictable, generating exogenous game‐to‐game variation in the vendor “Wage.” I exploit the observable shifts in product demand conditions across games to estimate the labor supply (participation) elasticity of stadium vendors. Estimates that recognize that demand conditions and vendor labor supply decisions simultaneously determine the vendor wage always find substantial labor supply elasticities, typically in the .55–.65 range. In contrast, estimates that ignore the endogeneity of the vendor wage yield severely downward-biased labor supply elasticities. These results highlight the importance of using demand shift instruments to identify labor supply elasticities in specific labor markets.

This paper empirically examines the relationship between enrollment is sex education and subsequent sexual behavior for U.S. teenagers during the 1970's. The estimates indicate that enrollment in sex education was associated with earlier sexual activity for females in this cohart. Sex education also was associated with earlier pregnancy for some group of females, but these effects are smaller and not always statistically significant. For both types of transitions, the effect of sex education appears to have been larger for women with fewer alternative sources of sexual information. In contrast, sex education had much less impact on male transitions into sexual activity. Within‐family analyses using sibling data reveal qualitatively similar patterns. Overall, the evidence suggests that sex education in the 1970's had some causal impact on teen sexual behavior, probably in significant part by providing information that enabled teens to alter the risks of sexual activity.

This paper draws several important lessons from the Tequila Crisis of 1994 and 1995. The overriding lesson is that the dynamics of financial crises in emerging market countries differ from those in industrialized countries because institutional features of their debt markets differ. Several policy lessons for emerging market countries also emerge from the analysis: (1) pegged exchange-rate regimes are extremely dangerous, (2) strong prudential supervision of the banking system is critical for prevention of financial crises, (3) financial liberalization must be managed extremely carefully and (4) different policies are needed to promote recovery in emerging market countries than those that are applicable to industrialized countries.

We examine foreign acquisitions of United States banks around the time of the ownership change to determine whether the observed poor performance of foreign subsidiaries is the result of changes in business strategy or the preexisting characteristics of the target bank. We find that many of the problems were already present at the time of acquisition. However, changes in business strategy by the foreign owners were generally not successful in raising the bank’s performance level to that of its domestic peers.

Present value studies of asset market efficiency are controversial because they compare asset prices to unobserved discounted streams of future rents. As an alternative, if housing markets are efficient, then the price of residential capital or buildings should satisfy the following two conditions: (i) deviations between new building prices and construction costs should disappear faster than construction lags and have no effect on construction, and (ii) temporary building price shocks should dissipate at a similar rate for different vintage buildings. Results from an error-correction model support both hypotheses for single-family housing in Vancouver, British Columbia. This implies that the implicit market for residential buildings is efficient and that any inefficiencies in the housing market must lie in the market for land itself.