This paper develops a model of intrahousehold allocation with endogenous fertility, which captures the relationship between birth order and investment in children. It shows that a birth order effect in intrahouse hold allocation can arise even without assumptions about parental preferences for specific birth orders of children or genetic endowments varying by birth order. The important contribution is that fertility is treated as endogenous, a possibility that other models of intrahousehold allocation have ignored. The implications of the model are that children with higher birth orders (that is, who are born later) have an advantage over siblings with lower birth orders, and that parents who are inequality-averse will not have more than one child. The model furthermore shows that not taking account of the endogeneity of fertility when analyzing intrahousehold allocation may seriously bias the results. The effects of a child's birth order on its human capital accumulation are analyzed using a longitudinal data set from the Philippines that covers a very long period. We examine the effects of birth order on both number of hours in school during education and completed education. The results for both are consistent with the predictions of the model.

ABSTRACT Recent work by Diether, Malloy, and Scherbina (2002) has established a negative relationship between stock returns and the dispersion of analysts' earnings forecasts. I offer a simple explanation for this phenomenon based on the interpretation of dispersion as a proxy for unpriced information risk arising when asset values are unobservable. The relationship then follows from a general options‐pricing result: For a levered firm, expected returns should always decrease with the level of idiosyncratic asset risk. This story is formalized with a straightforward model. Reasonable parameter values produce large effects, and the theory's main empirical prediction is supported in cross‐sectional tests.

This paper compares two attributes of a deferred tax liability (DTL) that arise from differences in book and tax depreciation methods. The first attribute is the effect of the DTL on the market value of the firm. The second is the length of time between when the asset is placed into service and when the DTL associated with that asset begins to reverse. The paper shows that a decrease in the time it takes for the DTL to begin to reverse is neither necessary nor sufficient for the value of the DTL to increase. It also shows that the value of the DTL is not equal to the present value of the future deferred tax expense. The effect of one dollar of DTL on firm value depends only on the tax depreciation rate and the discount rate.

We examine the efficiency implications of a manager's financial reporting system choice and disclosure management. When a manager has some private information that is not captured by a firm's financial reporting system and may manipulate the financial report at some cost, we show that the manager may not choose the most precise financial reporting system. We examine how reporting system choice varies with the precision of the manager's private information captured by the reporting system, precision of information that is not captured by the reporting system, and the manager's cost of manipulating the report. We consider the effect of reporting discretion on the efficiency with which investors allocate resources.

From 1996 to 1998, listed companies in China were required to achieve a minimum return on equity (ROE) of 10 percent in each of the previous three years before they could apply for permission to issue additional shares. As a result of this rule, there was a heavy concentration of ROEs in the area just above 10 percent. We show that the Chinese regulators appear to have scrutinized firms using excess amounts of nonoperating income to reach the 10 percent hurdle. In addition, their ability to do so seems to have improved over time, which allows them to be better able to identify firms that subsequently performed better. However, many firms were still able to gain rights issue approval through excess nonoperating income. We show that these firms subsequently underperformed other approved firms that did not use the same practice, indicating that the Chinese regulators' objective of guiding capital resources toward the well-performing sectors is partially compromised by earnings management.

This paper investigates a generalized method of moments (GMM) approach to the estimation of autoregressive roots near unity with panel data and incidental deterministic trends. Such models arise in empirical econometric studies of firm size and in dynamic panel data modeling with weak instruments. The two moment conditions in the GMM approach are obtained by constructing bias corrections to the score functions under OLS and GLS detrending, respectively. It is shown that the moment condition under GLS detrending corresponds to taking the projected score on the Bhattacharya basis, linking the approach to recent work on projected score methods for models with infinite numbers of nuisance parameters (Waterman and Lindsay (1998)). Assuming that the localizing parameter takes a nonpositive value, we establish consistency of the GMM estimator and find its limiting distribution. A notable new finding is that the GMM estimator has convergence rate , slower than , when the true localizing parameter is zero (i.e., when there is a panel unit root) and the deterministic trends in the panel are linear. These results, which rely on boundary point asymptotics, point to the continued difficulty of distinguishing unit roots from local alternatives, even when there is an infinity of additional data.

Managed Care, Information, and Diffusion: The Case of Treatment for Heart-Attack Patients by Laurence C. Baker, Christopher C. Afendulis and Paul A. Heidenreich. Published in volume 94, issue 2, pages 347-351 of American Economic Review, May 2004

As the dominant provider of payments services, the efficiency with which the Federal Reserve provides such services is an important public policy issue. This paper examines the productivity of Federal Reserve check-processing offices during 1980–1999 using non-parametric estimation methods and newly developed methods for non-parametric inference and hypothesis testing. The results support prior studies that found little initial improvement in the Fed's efficiency with the imposition of pricing for Federal Reserve services in 1982. However, we find that median productivity improved substantially during the 1990s, and the dispersion of productivity across Fed offices declined.

ABSTRACT We examine a sample of 8,313 cases, between 1951 and 2001, where firms unexpectedly increase their research and development (R&D) expenditures by a significant amount. We find consistent evidence of a misreaction, as manifested in the significantly positive abnormal stock returns that our sample firms' shareholders experience following these increases. We also find consistent evidence that our sample firms experience significantly positive long‐term abnormal operating performance following their R&D increases. Our findings suggest that R&D increases are beneficial investments, and that the market is slow to recognize the extent of this benefit (consistent with investor underreaction).