Female headship among black families long has been more pronounced in the United States in comparison with other ethnic groups. E. Franklin Frazier's classic study of the black family in the 1930's placed a distinct emphasis on the disproportionately high number of urban Negro families with women heads. Frazier's work suggested that throughout the pre-World War II period almost one-quarter of black families were headed by women. In the mid-1960's, female headship among black families was the subject of Johnson Administration policy planner Daniel Moynihan's notorious characterization of the black family as enmeshed in a tangle of pathology. But while the subsequent debate between disciples of Moynihan's pathology-disorganization perspective and the proponents of the strength-resiliency perspective raged, the proportion of black families with female heads has risen markedly. The proportion climbed from slightly less than 25 percent in 1965 to an astonishing more than 40 percent by 1980. Female headship also has grown among white families, but the rate of increase has not approached that among blacks. Between 1965 and 1980, the percent of white female-headed families rose from 9 percent to close to 12 percent.

Let V(X) be any direct utility function characterizing consumer preferences that are reflexive, transitive, and complete, and whose parameters are fixed relative to the usual linear budget constraint p X = M. Here X designates the vector (X1,.. ., X,) and is confined to the positive n-orthant; Xi designates quantity of the ith commodity; p is the vector (P,, ...,pn) of positive commodity prices; and M designates total expenditure. Let X(p, M) designate the system of demand functions derived from V(X) subject to pX = M, which possess the properties of zero degree homogeneity, symmetry, and semidefinite negativity. Let W( X; 0) designate a direct utility function with (a) parameter vector 0 dependent on the price vector p that appears in the budget constraint and (b) that rationalizes the same system of demand functions as V(X), namely, X(p, M). Probably, many economists who have considered price-dependent preferences' would conjecture that every such price-dependent utility function W(X; p) satisfying (a) and (b) is of the rather restricted form

ABSTRACT This paper develops an equilibrium model in which informational asymmetries about the qualities of products offered for sale are resolved through a mechanism which combines the signalling and costly screening approaches. The model is developed in the context of a capital market setting in which bondholders produce costly information about a firm's a priori imperfectly known earnings distribution and use this information in specifying a bond valuation schedule to the firm. Given this schedule, the firm's optimal choices of debt‐equity ratio and debt maturity structure subsequently signal to prospective shareholders the relevant parameters of the firm's earnings distribution.

This paper develops an equilibrium model in which informational asymmetries about the qualities of products offered for sale are resolved through a mechanism which combines the signalling and costly screening approachs. The model is developed in the context of a capital market setting in which bondholders produce costly information about a firm's priori imperfectly known earnings distribution and use this information in specifyihng a bond valuation schedule to the firm. Given this schedule, the firm's optimal choices of debt-equity ratio and debt maturity structure subsequently signal to prospective shareholders the relevant parameters of the firm's earnings distribution.