We provide new evidence on the relation between option-based compensation and risk-taking behavior by exploiting the change in the accounting treatment of stock options following the adoption of FAS 123R in 2005. The implementation of FAS 123R represents an exogenous change in the accounting benefits of stock options that has no effect on the economic costs and benefits of options for providing managerial incentives. Our results do not support the view that the convexity inherent in option-based compensation is used to reduce risk-related agency problems between managers and shareholders. We show that all firms dramatically reduce their usage of stock options (convexity) after the adoption of FAS 123R and that the decline in option use is strongly associated with a proxy for accounting costs. Little evidence exists that the decline in option usage following the accounting change results in less risky investment and financial policies.

This paper presents an alternative method to derive the limiting distribution of residual-based statistics. Our method does not impose an explicit assumption of (asymptotic) smoothness of the statistic of interest with respect to the model's parameters and thus is especially useful in cases where such smoothness is difficult to establish. Instead, we use a locally uniform convergence in distribution condition, which is automatically satisfied by residual-based specification test statistics. To illustrate, we derive the limiting distribution of a new functional form specification test for discrete choice models, as well as a runs-based tests for conditional symmetry in dynamic volatility models.

This paper considers how oral contraception's diffusion to young unmarried women affected the number and parental characteristics of children born to these women. In the short-term, pill access caused declines in fertility and increases in both the share of children born with low birthweight and the share born to poor households. In the long-term, access led to negligible changes in fertility while increasing the share of children with college-educated mothers and decreasing the share with divorced mothers. The short-term effects appear to be driven by upwardly-mobile women opting out of early childbearing while the long-term effects appear to be driven by a retiming of births to later ages. These effects differ from those of abortion legalization, although we find suggestive evidence that pill diffusion lowered abortions. Our results suggest that abortion and the pill are on average used for different purposes by different women, but on the margin some women substitute from abortion towards the pill when both are available. JELNo. I0, J13, N12.

Governments provide public information to reduce information imperfections. Do households rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions? To identify the importance of public information in households' price expectations, we take advantage of a unique natural experiment in Ecuador where the published inflation rate had been different from the correct rate over a period of fourteen months due to a software error. We find that the public signal about prices plays an important role in households' price expectations, and the change in price expectations affects their savings choices. The effect is stronger for better-educated and older people.

Institutions often have access to corporate inside information through their connections, but relatively little is known about the extent to which they exploit their informational advantage through short-term trading. We employ broker-level trading data to systematically examine possible cases of connected trading. Despite examining the issue from multiple angles, we are unable to find much evidence to support that investment bank clients take advantage of connections through takeover advising, IPO and SEO underwriting, or lending relationships. In contrast to recent academic literature and popular press, our findings suggest that institutional investors are reluctant to use inside information in traceable manners.

We study the behavioural foundation of interdependent preferences, where the outcomes of others affect the welfare of the decision maker. These preferences are taken as given, not derived from more primitive ones. Our aim is to establish an axiomatic foundation providing the link between observation of choices and a functional representation which is convenient, free of inconsistencies and can provide the basis for measurement. The dependence among preferences may take place in two conceptually different ways, expressing two different views of the nature of interdependent preferences. The first is Festinger's view that the evaluation of peers' outcomes is useful to improve individual choices by learning from the comparison. The second is Veblen's view that interdependent preferences keep track of social status derived from a social value attributed to the goods one consumes. Corresponding to these two different views, we have two different formulations. In the first, the decision maker values his outcomes and those of others on the basis of his own utility. In the second, he ranks outcomes according to a social value function. We give different axiomatic foundations to these two different, but complementary, views of the nature of the interdependence. On the basis of this axiomatic foundation, we build a behavioural theory of comparative statics within subjects and across subjects. We characterize preferences according to the relative importance assigned to gains and losses in social domain, that is pride and envy. This parallels the standard analysis of private gains and losses (as well as that of regret and relief). We give an axiomatic foundation of interpersonal comparison of preferences, ordering individuals according to their sensitivity to social ranking. These characterizations provide the behavioural foundation for applied analysis of market and game equilibria with interdependent preferences.

Prior research demonstrates that investors respond differently to earnings surprises that are part of a string of consecutive earnings increases or surprises than to those that are not. To shed light on who values these patterns, I compare trading responses of small and large traders to earnings surprises that occur during a series of positive or negative surprises. I find that the relative intensity of small traders' trading response (and, to a lesser extent, that of medium traders) to earnings surprises generally increases as a series progresses. Small traders respond more negatively to the second (third) negative surprise in a series than to the first (second), and more positively for the first three surprises in a positive series. Moreover, I find that announcement-period returns are related to the trading of small and medium traders. These results suggest that less sophisticated smaller traders, responding to earnings series, contribute to previously documented pricing patterns. Data Availability: All data used in this study, with the exception of data obtained from an anonymous discount brokerage firm, are publicly available from the sources indicated in the text.

This paper has three objectives. First, using a richer and more comprehensive set of IMF-related news than previous studies, we examine the impact of IMF-related news on both financial and real stock sector returns in Indonesia during the Asian crisis. Second, we draw lessons about financial and real sectoral patterns of adjustment in crisis countries, including whether and how IMF programs facilitate this adjustment. Third, we explore the interplay between IMF actions in crisis countries and the actions and responses of local authorities. To do so, not only do we account for the impact of news regarding IMF policy actions but also the government’s reaction to them and willingness to implement such policies, and the public sentiment about the implemented IMF programs and government policies. We discuss the policy implications of the findings.

On May 29, 2008 the Wall Street Journal published an article alleging that several global banks were reporting Libor quotes significantly lower than those implied by prevailing credit default swap (CDS) spreads. While acknowledging that the “analysis doesn’t prove that banks are lying or manipulating Libor,” it nevertheless conjectures that these banks may “have been low-balling their borrowing rates to avoid looking desperate for cash.” In this paper we compare Libor with other short-term borrowing rates, analyze individual bank quotes, and compare these individual quotes to CDS spreads and market capitalization data during three periods: 1/1/07–8/8/07 (Period 1), 8/9/07–4/16/08 (Period 2), and 4/17/08–5/30/08 (Period 3). We find some anomalous individual quotes, but the evidence is inconsistent with a material manipulation of the US dollar 1-month Libor rate.

We examine the welfare effects of provision of local public goods in an empirically relevant setting using a multi-community model with mobile and heterogeneous households and with flexible housing supplies. We characterize the first-best allocation and show efficiency can be implemented with decentralization using head taxes. We calibrate the model and compare welfare in property-tax equilibria, both decentralized and centralized, to the efficient allocation. Inefficiencies with decentralization and property taxation are large, dissipating most if not all the potential welfare gains that efficient decentralization could achieve. In property-tax equilibrium, centralization is frequently more efficient! An externality in community choice underlies the failure to achieve efficiency with decentralization and property taxes: poorer households crowd richer communities and free ride by consuming relatively little housing thereby avoiding taxes.