This is a review article based on W. O. Henderson's two-volume Life of Friedrich Engels. After a brief biographical summary, Engels's contributions to political economy are examined, and it is suggested that these are much more important than has so far been recognized (e.g., by Schumpeter). In particular, Engels's paper "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" announced several of the basic and least invalid themes of Marxist political economy. Later Engels, when criticizing Utopian socialism, contributed a very remarkable account of the essential functions of the competitive price mechanism.

A DAM Smith (1937) observed that "the whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labor and stock must, in the same neighborhood, be either perfectly equal or continually tending to equality."If a job poses health and safety risks that are especially great, a worker will require higher levels of compensation or greater non-pecuniary benefits in order for him to accept the risky job.Despite the fact that the theory of compensating differentials is almost two centuries old, it has been only recently that this theory has been subjected to successful empirical tests.'The purposes of this essay are twofold.First, in section II, I will formalize the theory of individual choice among potentially hazardous jobs for the general situation in which worker preferences are contingent on the health state outcome.An important implication of this analysis is that the job risk that a worker selects will be negatively related to his wealth.The second purpose of the investigation is to test the two principal conceptual hypotheses.The characteristics of the principal data source to be used are summarized in section III.The University of Michigan Survey of Working Conditions, which is the data set used in the compensating differentials analysis, provides very extensive information concerning the nature of the worker's particular job and his personal characteristics.Section IV presents the analysis of the earnings differentials generated by job hazards and other job attributes.In section V, I consider the responsiveness of the job risk to a worker's wealth.The empirical findings, which are consistent with the theoretical predictions, are summarized in section VI. II. Optimal Choice among Hazardous Job AlternativesRecent economic analyses of choices among potentially hazardous jobs have generalized Adam Smith's notion of compensating wage differentials to probabilistic contexts.The study by Oi (1973) views adverse job consequences as being tantamount to a drop in income.He concludes that jobs posing greater risks will command compensating wage differentials.A more detailed analysis along similar lines is presented by Thaler and Rosen (1976), who develop Oi's approach and also consider the situation in which individuals face lotteries on life and death.2The payoff after an adverse outcome (death) is represented by a bequest function.The approach taken here also can be viewed as a probabilistic generalization of the compensating differential analysis.It differs in that individuals' utility functions are assumed to be dependent on one's health state.The static model in this section illustrates the properties of the optimal job choice of a worker who is choosing from a set of job opportunities that involve the same number of work hours but have differing probabilities of an adverse consequence.3This approach does not impose assumptions that are unduly restrictive since most job opportunities offer little individual leeway in the choice of hours.

This paper is an analysis of the effects of anticipations of government sales policies on the real price of gold. Although the risk of a future government gold auction depresses the price, it also causes the price to rise in percentage terms faster than the real rate of interest and at an increasing rate. Even risk-neutral investors require this rate of return as inducement to hold gold in the face of the asymmetric risk of a price collapse. Announcements making a government auction more probable cause a sudden drop in the price. Government attempts to peg the price or to defend a price ceiling with sales from its stockpile must result eventually in a sudden attack by speculators.

Abstract The primary goals of this paper were (a) to test the information content of stock dividend announcements and (b) to produce evidence about the validity of the AICPA conclusion that small stock dividends almost always produce significant amounts of extra value on the ex date and that large stock dividends fail to generate such ex date value. In regard to the first objective, the authors' findings imply that the market, in the aggregate, uses stock dividend information in setting equilibrium security prices, that much of the market's reaction to such information occurs no later than the declaration date, and that such information tends to produce positive unexpected returns. With respect to the second goal, the results imply that the market is not conditioned to react positively to stock dividends of any size on the ex date and, consequently, that the AICPA conclusion is valid (invalid) with respect to large (small) stock dividends.

Abstract Abstract: The goal of this study is to investigate the incremental information content of the 10-K (i.e., the information content of the data which are contained in the 10-K, but which are not included in the annual report) from a market perspective. This objective was accomplished by examining aggregate market reaction to the 10-K via several statistical procedures. Each of these procedures appears to imply that the market, in the aggregate, uses the incremental data in the 10-K in setting equilibrium security prices and, consequently, that this data set possesses information content.

Abstract Reviews the book "Profit Measurement During Inflation," by Y. Goldschmidt and K. Admon.

I. Introduction, 603. — II. Infinitely inelastic demand for labor, the Hollander thesis, 605. — III. Thornton's influence, 608. — IV. Thornton on labor, part II, 611. — V. Final considerations, 614.