This article analyzes an experimental program that offered payments to unemployment insurance (UI) recipients who found a job quickly. The experiment provided exogenous differences in individual incentives which I use to test labor supply and search theories of unemployment. I examine predictions about the timing of exits from unemployment and the effect of the fixed-amount bonus on different wage level groups. I also argue that the experimental evidence does not show the desirability of a permanent program. A permanent program would sharply increase the compensation for short UI spells, likely increasing the claims rate and possibly increasing unemployment.

Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip who work in Israel generally earn more than Palestinians employed locally, but this wage premium is highly volatile. Beginning with the 1987 Palestinian uprising, changes in wage differentials by work location parallel Palestinian absences from work in Israel. This article interprets changing location differentials in response to exogenous shocks as movements along an Israeli demand curve for migrant workers. Estimates of a model of the West Bank and Gaza Strip labor market are used to evaluate the effect of policies governing Palestinian access to the Israeli labor market.

This paper proposes a microfoundation for social increasing returns in human capital accumulation. The underlying mechanism is a pecuniary externality due to the interaction of ex ante investments and costly bilateral search in the labor market. It is shown that the equilibrium rate of return on the human capital of a worker is increasing in the average human capital of the workforce even though all the production functions in the economy exhibit constant returns to scale, there are no technological externalities, and all workers are competing for the same jobs.

Despite a surplus of candidates for most teaching jobs, a strong academic record does little for an applicants job prospects. This does not appear to result from lukewarm interest on the part of such applicants or choosiness about the positions they accept. Administrators' lack of interest in these candidates may reflect the weakness of competitive pressures in public education. Policies intended to improve teacher quality need to consider incentives on both the demand and supply sides of the market.

This paper provides an analysis of the implications of the Feltham and Ohlson (1995) model for the relationship between unexpected security returns and unexpected earnings and cash flows. A simplified version of the Feltham and Ohlson linear information model is utilized to provide an intuitive explanation of the coefficients in the unexpected returns equation and to show that incremental information content for unexpected free cash flow beyond accounting earnings in the model depends on the existence of positive net present value (NPV) investment opportunities. The paper concludes by arguing that the model provides useful insights into factors that may influence the empirical relationship between security returns and accounting data. Résumé. L'auteur expose les résultats d'une analyse des répercussions du modèle de Feltham et Ohlson (1995) sur la relation entre les rendements imprévus des titres, d'une part, et les bénéfices et les flux monétaires imprévus, d'autre part. Il a recours à une version simplifiée du modèle d'information linéaire de Feltham et Ohlson pour expliquer intuitivement les coefficients de l'équation des rendements imprévus et pour montrer que, dans le modèle, le contenu marginal en information supérieur des flux monétaires disponibles imprévus par rapport aux bénéfices comptables dépend des possibilités d'investissement existantes offrant une valeur actualisée nette (VAN) positive. L'auteur conclut en affirmant que le modèle livre des renseignements utiles quant aux facteurs susceptibles d'influencer la relation empirique entre les rendements des titres et les données comptables.

Simultaneity between prisoner populations and crime rates makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of changes in prison populations on crime. To break that simultaneity, this paper uses prison overcrowding litigation in a state as an instrument for changes in the prison population. The resulting elasticities are two to three times greater than those of previous studies. A one-prisoner reduction is associated with an increase of fifteen Index I crimes per year. While calculations of the costs of crime are inherently uncertain, it appears that the social benefits associated with crime reduction equal or exceed the social costs of incarceration for the marginal prisoner.

This paper develops procedures for inference about the moments of smooth functions of out-of-sample predictions and prediction errors when there is a long time series of predictions and realizations. The aim is to provide tools for analysis of predictive accuracy and efficiency and, more generally, of predictive ability. The paper allows for nonnested and nonlinear models as well as for possible dependence of predictions and prediction errors on estimated regression parameters. Simulations indicate that the procedures can work well in samples of size typically available.