This paper proposes and develops a novel, simple, widely applicable numerical approach for option pricing based on quadrature methods. Though in some ways similar to lattice or finite-difference schemes, it possesses exceptional accuracy and speed. Discretely monitored options are valued with only one timestep between observations, and nodes can be perfectly placed in relation to discontinuities. Convergence is improved greatly; in the extrapolated scheme, a doubling of points can reduce error by a factor of 256. Complex problems (e.g., fixed-strike lookback discrete barrier options) can be evaluated accurately and orders of magnitude faster than by existing methods.

We investigate whether institutional investors “vote with their feet” when dissatisfied with a firm's management by examining changes in equity ownership around forced CEO turnover. We find that aggregate institutional ownership and the number of institutional investors decline in the year prior to forced CEO turnover. However, selling by institutions is far from universal. Overall, there is an increase in shareholdings of individual investors and a decrease in holdings of institutional investors who are more concerned with holding prudent securities, are better informed, or are engaged in momentum trading. Measures of institutional ownership changes are negatively related to the likelihoods of forced CEO turnover and that an executive from outside the firm is appointed CEO.

In the 1990s, many states passed workers' compensation laws to control cost growth. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we determine the impact of these laws on the frequency of reported workplace injuries. In response to restrictions that make it more difficult to file claims, reported days-away-from-work injuries decline, accounting for between 7.0% and 9.4% of the dramatic fall in their frequency in 1991–1997. At the same time, these filing disincentives appear to account for 6.8% of the increase in cases with only restricted work activity, although the evidence is weaker for these injuries. Restricting workers' choice of medical care provider did not appear to reduce the frequency of cases in any nonfatal injury category.

This paper analyzes the relationship between economic reform and the democratic process to ask the following question: Does the likelihood of adoption of an economic reform increase with an increase in the efficiency benefits from that reform? A priori we might expect that this likelihood should increase monotonically, for two reasons. First, economic reform results in an increase in the size of the national pie. If the government has the ability to make compensatory tax-transfers, an increase in each citizen's income is possible. Second, a larger economic reform results in a greater number of winners. This might also be expected to reinforce the political support for economic reform. So we should expect a reform with greater efficiency benefits to a larger population to have a greater chance of adoption by the government. However, in this paper we show that this intuition is mistaken. In particular, we demonstrate that there exists a certain non-monotonicity between the distribution of winners from economic reform and the probability of its adoption. An increase in the number of winners may lower, rather than increase, the likelihood of adoption of economic reform. In particular, even though reforms that benefit a minority or an overwhelming majority are adopted, reforms that benefit a smaller majority are not adopted.

This paper challenges the findings of Frankel et al. (2002) (FJN). The results of our discretionary accruals tests differ from FJN's when we adjust discretionary current accruals for firm performance. In our earnings benchmark tests, in contrast to FJN we find no statistically significant association between firms meeting analyst forecasts and auditor fees. Our market reaction tests also provide different results than those reported by FJN. Overall, our study indicates that FJN's results are sensitive to research design choices, and we find no systematic evidence supporting their claim that auditors violate their independence as a result of clients purchasing relatively more nonaudit services.

We are interested in estimating the average effect of a binary treatment on a scalar outcome. If assignment to the treatment is exogenous or unconfounded, that is, independent of the potential outcomes given covariates, biases associated with simple treatment-control average comparisons can be removed by adjusting for differences in the covariates. Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983) show that adjusting solely for differences between treated and control units in the propensity score removes all biases associated with differences in covariates. Although adjusting for differences in the propensity score removes all the bias, this can come at the expense of efficiency, as shown by Hahn (1998), Heckman, Ichimura, and Todd (1998), and Robins, Mark, and Newey (1992). We show that weighting by the inverse of a nonparametric estimate of the propensity score, rather than the true propensity score, leads to an efficient estimate of the average treatment effect. We provide intuition for this result by showing that this estimator can be interpreted as an empirical likelihood estimator that efficiently incorporates the information about the propensity score.

Abstract We analyze the dynamic investment decision of a firm subject to an endogenous financing constraint. The threat of future funding shortfalls lowers the value of the firm's timing options and encourages acceleration of investment beyond the first‐best optimal level. As well as highlighting another way by which capital market frictions can distort investment behavior, this result implies that (1) the sensitivity of investment to cash flow can be greatest for high‐liquidity firms and (2) greater uncertainty has an ambiguous effect on investment.

This paper applies revealed preference theory to the nonparametric statistical analysis of consumer demand. Knowledge of expansion paths is shown to improve the power of nonparametric tests of revealed preference. The tightest bounds on indifference surfaces and welfare measures are derived using an algorithm for which revealed preference conditions are shown to guarantee convergence. Nonparametric Engel curves are used to estimate expansion paths and provide a stochastic structure within which to examine the consistency of household level data and revealed preference theory. An application is made to a long time series of repeated cross-sections from the Family Expenditure Survey for Britain. The consistency of these data with revealed preference theory is examined. For periods of consistency with revealed preference, tight bounds are placed on true cost of living indices.

We assemble bank-level and other data for Fed member banks to model determinants of bank failure. Fundamentals explain bank failure risk well. The first two Friedman-Schwartz crises are not associated with positive unexplained residual failure risk, or increased importance of bank illiquidity for forecasting failure. The third Friedman-Schwartz crisis is more ambiguous, but increased residual failure risk is small in the aggregate. The final crisis (early 1933) saw a large unexplained increase in bank failure risk. Local contagion and illiquidity may have played a role in pre-1933 bank failures, even though those effects were not large in their aggregate impact.

The consequences of bank distress for the economy during the Depression remain an area of unresolved controversy. Since John M. Keynes (1931) and Irving Fisher (1933), macroeconomists have argued that bank distress magnified the extent of the economic decline during the Depression. As the intermediaries controlling money and credit, banks were in a special position to transmit their distress to other sectors. But the mechanism through which banking distress mattered for the economy has been hotly contested.