We link farmland values to climatic, soil, and socioeconomic variables for counties east of the 100th meridian, the historic boundary of agriculture not primarily dependent on irrigation. Degree days, a non-linear transformation of the climatic variables suggested by agronomic experiments as more relevant to crop yield gives an improved fit and increased robustness. Estimated coefficients are consistent with the experimental results. The model is employed to estimate the potential impacts on farmland values for a range of recent warming scenarios. The predictions are very robust and more than 75% of the counties in our sample show a statistically significant effect, ranging from moderate gains to large losses, with losses in the aggregate that can become quite large under scenarios involving sustained heavy use of fossil fuels.

We examine the role of banks in the transmission of monetary policy. In economies where banks use real demand deposits to finance their lending, fluctuations in the timing of production can force banks to scramble for real liquidity, or even fail, which can greatly affect lending and aggregate output. The adverse effect on output can be reduced if banks finance with nominal deposits. Nominal deposits also open a “financial liquidity” channel for monetary policy to affect real activity. The banking system may be better off, however, issuing real deposits (e.g., foreign exchange denominated) under some circumstances.

Labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings, transfers, and income. Yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts. We investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random-assignment data from Connecticut's Jobs First waiver, which features key elements of post-1996 welfare programs. Estimated quantile treatment effects exhibit the substantial heterogeneity predicted by labor supply theory. Thus mean impacts miss a great deal. Looking separately at samples of dropouts and other women does not improve the performance of mean impacts. We conclude that welfare reform's effects are likely both more varied and more extensive than has been recognized.

ABSTRACT We derive an intertemporal asset pricing model and explore its implications for trading volume and asset returns. We show that investors trade in only two portfolios: the market portfolio, and a hedging portfolio that is used to hedge the risk of changing market conditions. We empirically identify the hedging portfolio using weekly volume and returns data for U.S. stocks, and then test two of its properties implied by the theory: Its return should be an additional risk factor in explaining the cross section of asset returns, and should also be the best predictor of future market returns.

This paper uses a new approach to examine whether income smoothing garbles earnings information or improves the informativeness of past and current earnings about future earnings and cash flows. We measure income smoothing by the negative correlation of a firm's change in discretionary accruals with its change in premanaged earnings. Using the approach of Collins et al. (1994), we find that the change in the current stock price of higher-smoothing firms contains more information about their future earnings than does the change in the stock price of lower-smoothing firms. This result is robust to decomposing earnings into cash flows and accruals and to controlling for firm size, growth, future earnings variability, private information search activities, and cross-sectional correlations.

ABSTRACT This paper provides a rational explanation for the apparent ability of managers to successfully time the maturity of their debt issues. We show that a structural break in excess bond returns during the early 1980s generates a spurious correlation between the fraction of long‐term debt in total debt issues and future excess bond returns. Contrary to Baker, Taliaferro, and Wurgler (2006) , we show that the presence of structural breaks can lead to nonsense regressions, whether or not there is any small sample bias. Tests using firm‐level data further confirm that managers are unable to time the debt market successfully.

Despite the classification of the cash flows on trading positions as operating under SFAS No. 102, trading is economically a hybrid operating/non-operating activity. Reflecting this hybrid nature, we hypothesize and find that the change in net trading assets has a less positive association with returns and future CFO than do the pure operating components of cash flows and accruals, and it has a more positive association with returns and future CFO than do the pure non-operating components of cash flows. Our paper is the first to propose and test hypotheses about the valuation implications of such hybrid cash flows and accruals.

ABSTRACT We analyze the likelihood of government bailouts of 450 politically connected firms from 35 countries during 1997–2002. Politically connected firms are significantly more likely to be bailed out than similar nonconnected firms. Additionally, politically connected firms are disproportionately more likely to be bailed out when the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank provides financial assistance to the firm's home government. Further, among bailed‐out firms, those that are politically connected exhibit significantly worse financial performance than their nonconnected peers at the time of and following the bailout. This evidence suggests that, at least in some countries, political connections influence the allocation of capital through the mechanism of financial assistance when connected companies confront economic distress.

ABSTRACT We analyze an entrepreneur/manager's choice between private and public ownership. The manager needs decision‐making autonomy to optimally manage the firm and thus trades off an endogenized control preference against the higher cost of capital accompanying greater managerial autonomy. Investors need liquid ownership stakes. Public capital markets provide liquidity, but stipulate corporate governance that imposes generic exogenous controls, so the manager may not attain the desired trade‐off between autonomy and the cost of capital. In contrast, private ownership provides the desired trade‐off through precisely calibrated contracting, but creates illiquid ownership. Exploring this tension generates new predictions.