R ECENT empirical studies in international trade, by Junz and Rhomberg [10], Kreinin [14] and in a major contribution, by Houthakker and Magee [6], have stressed the importance of different price and income elasticities of demand for exports and imports among countries as determinants of trade patterns. However, questions as to why such differences in elasticities arise remain open. An important component of the problem is whether the price and income elasticities of demand for individual exporters' products vary systematically across customer markets. This paper attempts partially to address the latter issue by examining the elasticities of United States exports of manufactured goods. The major finding is that a relationship exists between the competitiveness of United States manufactured goods exports in various foreign countries and the nature of the customer market. The result has implications, outlined below, for projections of future United States trade balances.

Thomas F. Cargill, Michael M. Hutchinson, Political Business Cycles with Endogenous Election Timing: Evidence from Japan, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Nov., 1991), pp. 733-739

The authors conduct a unique test of adverse selection in the equity issuance process. While common stock is the dominant means of payment in bank mergers, stock acquisition agreements provide target shareholders with varying degrees of protection against adverse price movements in the bidder's stock between the time of the merger agreement and the time of merger completion. The authors show that it is the degree of protection against adverse price changes and not the percent of stock offered in a bank merger that explains bidder merger announcement abnormal returns. This result is difficult to explain outside of an adverse selection framework.

This paper analyzes investment rules for various organizational forms that are distinguished by the characteristics of their residual claims. Different restrictions on residual claims lead to different decision rules. The analysis indicates that the investment decisions of open corporations, financial mutuals and non-profits can be modeled by the value maximization rule. However, the decisions of proprietorships, partnerships, and closed corporations cannot in general be modeled by the market value rule.

This paper provides a detailed examination of the cost imposed by thrift institutions resolved during the period 1980-88. A simple model is presented to explain the cost of resolution. This model is tested empirically with a comprehensive data set that permits us to avoid some of the econometric problems present in earlier studies. The empirical evidence suggests that the model that explains resolution costs in the late 1980s is significantly different from the model for either the middle or early 1980s. This evidence is consistent with the changing nature of the thrift crisis and changes in the regulator's closure rule. Our econometric evidence, moreover, is consistent with the hypothesis that, for troubled institutions, tangible net worth systematically understates market-value net worth. In addition, the importance of including time effects as well as institution effects as determinants of the cost of resolution is revealed.

The mere marketing of firms as environmentally friendly does not mean that the firms are genuinely green. In this paper, we propose a new measure, Green Score , to capture firms’ investment in green human capital based on the concentration of green skills required in firms’ job postings. First, we find that firms that increase their Green Score have higher future profitability. Second, firms that increase their Green Score generate more green patents, and those green patents are of higher quality and receive more citations. Third, traditional ratings widely used to evaluate firms’ environmental efforts do not consider firms’ Green Score . Overall, our new action-based measure is simpler and less subjective and it offers a larger time-series variation than traditional disclosure-based environmental ratings.

We conduct a unique test of adverse selection in the equity issuance process. While common stock is the dominant means of payment in bank mergers, stock acquisition agreements provide target shareholders with varying degrees of protection against adverse price movements in the bidder's stock between the time of the merger agreement and the time of merger completion. We show that it is the degree of protection against adverse price changes and not the percent of stock offered in a bank merger that explains bidder merger announcement abnormal returns. This result is difficult to explain outside of an adverse selection framework.

We conduct a unique test of adverse selection in the equity issuance process. While common stock is the dominant means of payment in bank mergers, stock acquisition agreements provide target shareholders with varying degrees of protection against adverse price movements in the bidder's stock between the time of the merger agreement and the time of merger completion. We show that it is the degree of protection against adverse price changes and not the percent of stock offered in a bank merger that explains bidder merger announcement abnormal returns. This result is difficult to explain outside of an adverse selection framework.