Mark E. Zmijewski, Methodological Issues Related to the Estimation of Financial Distress Prediction Models, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 22, Studies on Current Econometric Issues in Accounting Research (1984), pp. 59-82

H. Gregg Lewis' estimates of the relative wage effect of unionism between 1920 and 1958 are routinely cited though they have rarely been subject to scrutiny. This paper extends Lewis' data to 1980 and, in particular, we construct a series on union membership that links up with the data available in the 1970's from the Current Population Surveys. We proceed to reexamine the effects of trade unions both on relative wages and on relative manhours worked.

This study assesses the stock market's reaction to a series of events leading up to a mandated change in accounting for retail land sales. Evidence is found to support the conclusion that the market reacted to some of these events in a manner consistent with the effects of the accounting change on debt annagement contracts. A distinctive aspect of the analysis is the efficient use of security returns data to detect market reactions and to derive empirical distributions of test statistics employed. The analysis is extended by a model for grouping regression equations known as seemingly unrelated regressions. However, the gains from this extension are modest.

Who should pay the resource costs of higher education? This paper investigates a simple model of the general equilibrium of the labor market with three skill levels. Those in the population with the lower level of intelligence and/or sophistication can only become low-skilled workers, but the brighter segment of the population can become either high- or medium-skilled workers. Given the tax structure, the welfare of each group is maximized by a unique subsidy rate on the cost of training high-skilled workers. Under several circumstances, the lower IQ group wants a higher subsidy rate than will the group that benefits directly from the training.

Geske derived in [1] expressions for the values of junior and senior debt and equity. In this paper, some confusion about these expressions is cleared up, and an error is corrected. We use the same notation as in [1].

Excessive layoffs in bad times and excessive quits in good times both stem from the same weakness in practical employment arrangements: the specific nature of worker-firm relations creates a situation of bilateral monopoly. Institutions which have arisen to avert the associated inefficiency cannot mimic the separation decisions of a perfect-information, first-best allocation rule. Simple employment rules based on predetermined or indexed wages are in many cases the most desirable among the class of feasible employment arrangements. More complicated contracts which seem to deal more effectively with turn-over issues either are infeasible because of informational requirements or create adverse incentives on some other dimension.

This paper formulates and estimates a model for the determination of employer and union demand for multiemployer (vs. single employer) bargaining units. Utility-maximizing, risk-averse firms and unions are both assumed to weigh the impact of each type of bargaining unit on the expected level and variability of profits and wages, respectively. The model is tested on a 1975 sample of 3,486 individual collective bargaining agreements. Because either party can generally leave a multiemployer unit without the other party's consent, a partially observed bivariate probit model is used to estimate demand for structure. It is found that the forgone profits due to a multiemployer unit (relative to a single-firm unit) lower firm demands for this type of unit, while forgone wages in a multiemployer unit (relative to a single-firm unit) lower union demand for this type of unit.