This study explores the linkages among job standard tightness, type of compensation scheme, and performance. It postulates that job standard tightness and type of compensation scheme affect not only workers' effort, but also their self-selection among employment contracts, and through these, job performance. A laboratory experiment yielded the following results: among subjects with assigned treatments, job standard tightness and type of compensation scheme had significant independent, but insignificant interactive effects on performance. Subjects who were permitted to choose their own compensation schemes (given an assigned job standard) self-selected among these by skill. There was also some indication that being able to select one's own compensation scheme, per se, enhanced performance. If supported by future studies, these results suggest that job standards and compensation schemes may affect performance not just by motivating a given set of employees, but also by affecting the type of employees an organization attracts from the labor market.

This study shows that the 1933 and 1934 Securities Acts significantly, and unexpectedly, increased firms' required financial disclosure while curtailing their accounting alternatives. These constraints are postulated to have affected the nature of outstanding bondholder-shareholder contracts and the future costs of entering into such contracts. These changes are hypothesized to have affected bondholder and shareholder wealth through shareholder-to-bondholder wealth transfers, modifying firms' investment, financing, and production opportunity sets, reducing shareholder-bondholder contracting costs, and through wealth transfers across firms. Empirical tests were performed on daily stock and bond returns during the deliberation period of each Act. The sample consisted of New York Stock Exchange stocks and bonds, and over-the-counter stocks. The evidence is consistent with the '33 Act having reduced shareholder wealth through interfirm wealth transfers, out-of-pocket compliance costs, and reduced opportunity sets. The evidence weakly suggests that the '33 Act enhanced bondholder wealth. However, this effect does not appear to have been due to a wealth transfer from shareholders. There is no evidence of a significant effect due to the '34 Act.