Teachers affect a variety of student outcomes through their influence on both cognitive and noncognitive skill. I proxy for students’ noncognitive skill using non–test score behaviors. These behaviors include absences, suspensions, course grades, and grade repetition in ninth grade. Teacher effects on test scores and those on behaviors are weakly correlated. Teacher effects on behaviors predict larger impacts on high school completion and other longer-run outcomes than their effects on test scores. Relative to using only test score measures, using effects on both test score and noncognitive measures more than doubles the variance of predictable teacher impacts on longer-run outcomes.

We document that backfilling in the ExecuComp database introduces a data-conditioning bias that can affect inferences and make replicating previous work difficult. Although backfilling can be advantageous due to greater data coverage, if not addressed, the oversampling of firms with strong managerial incentives and higher subsequent returns leads to a significant upward bias in abnormal compensation, pay-for-performance sensitivity, and the magnitudes of several previously established relations. The bias also can lead to one misinterpreting the appropriate functional form of a relation and whether the data support one compensation theory over another. We offer methods to address this issue. Received May 12, 2014; editorial decision May 10, 2016 by Editor David Hirshleifer.

Directors are not one-dimensional. We characterize their skill sets by exploiting Regulation S-K's 2009 requirement that U.S. firms must disclose the experience, qualifications, attributes, or skills that led the nominating committee to choose an individual as a director. We then examine how skills cluster on and across boards. Factor analysis indicates that the main dimension along which boards vary is in the diversity of skills of their directors. We find that firm performance increases when director skill sets exhibit more commonality.

This paper uses world running records by age to estimate a biological frontier of decline rates. Two models are compared: a linear/ quadratic (LQ) model and a nonparametric model. Two estimation methods are used: (a) minimizing the squared difference between the observed records and the modeled biological frontier and (b) using extreme value theory to estimate the biological frontier that maximizes the probability of observing the existing world records by age. The results support the LQ model and suggest a linear percentage decline up to the late 70s and quadratic decline after that.

The recent surge in the use of team-managed funds in the mutual fund industry suggests that the benefits of team management might outweigh its costs. However, extant empirical evidence is not consistent with the view that team-managed funds generate superior returns relative to individual-managed funds. We argue that the benefits of team management are likely to be manifested in the presence of strong board monitoring because the potential free-rider problems within team-managed funds are alleviated. Our findings, that smaller boards and boards with a higher proportion of independent directors are positively associated with performance in team but not individual-managed funds, are consistent with this view. Our results suggest that in team-managed fund structures, where the potential free-riding problems exist, the presence of strong board monitoring improves fund performance.

Using a sample of US publicly traded property-liability insurers, we examine the effect of corporate transparency on earnings management. We find that a higher level of corporate transparency is associated with more conservative loss-reserves estimation. Our evidence shows that the positive effect of corporate transparency on insurers’ reserves-estimate conservatism is more pronounced for insurers that are smaller and have more diversified lines of business and that certain board characteristics—such as being smaller, meeting more frequently, and having a higher percentage of independent directors—can restrain the inadequate reserves management of less transparent US publicly traded property-liability insurers. We also provide evidence that additional regulatory mandates to seek greater transparency in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act may be redundant, given the existing regulations in the property-liability insurance industry. Finally, we find insurers’ conservative reserve estimates were more pronounced during the 2008–2009 financial crisis.

We examine the impact of rivals’ competitive activities on firms’ quantity-of-capital constraints in 60 countries. Prior work shows that competition increases the costs of debt and equity, which reduce the economic profit from investment. Capital constraints, however, may prevent firms from exploiting all positive NPV projects. Using unique survey data and several econometric techniques, we address endogeneity problems that affect both capital constraints and rivals’ competitive activities. We find that rivals’ competitive activities are positively associated with firms’ capital constraints and are more strongly correlated with capital constraints than banking sector competition. We also show that quantity-of-capital constraints are negatively related to firm growth, incremental to the cost of capital.

ABSTRACT We study intertemporal incentive properties of conditional accounting conservatism. Conservatism has detrimental and beneficial properties. In our first model, conservatism introduces downward bias in the first period; any understatement of first-period performance is reversed in the second period. A conservative bias is not costly in the first period but instead is costly in the second period when a new manager may be rewarded for the performance of his predecessor. In an extension on learning, we illustrate a beneficial role of conservatism in fine-tuning incentives. In the second model, conservatism is modeled as recognizing effort-independent bad news early and good news late. Recognizing bad news early can be optimal because of intertemporal rent shifting, which improves incentives via an “incentive spillback.” We also study overlapping projects (a multi-task setting) in which an interior accounting system can be optimal to avoid making one of the overlapping projects an incentive bottleneck. JEL Classifications: D21; D74; D82; D86.

Any risk-return tradeoff analysis in aggregate equity markets relies on appropriate measures of risk, in most studies based on (co-)variance relations. Consequently, in integrated global markets, country-specific expected return is priced with a world price of covariance risk. This study relates domestic excess stock returns to the world downside risk. Evidence shows that downside tail risk (as a multiplier of volatility) has long memory cointegration properties; hence, the underlying risk aversion behavior in an integrated market is associated with the conditional quantile ratio, the correlation of stock returns, and the cointegrating coefficient of downside risk. Our empirical results based on G7 countries indicate that investors are averse to downside risk, which via Cornish–Fisher expansions is related to higher moment risk and interpretable in a utility-based decision framework.

We study the relative importance of social factors (including household, workplace, and neighborhood peer effects) and personal characteristics (including age, gender, tax rates, and funds under management) for asset allocation decisions. The most important factors (in order) are household peer effects, personal characteristics and workplace peer effects. Neighborhood peer effects and financial advice play a less important role. We use instrumental variables for both household and workplace peer effects and find results that are consistent with causal peer effects.