Each of 2 Universities-National Bureau of Economic Research Conferences on demographic economics held in 1958 and in 1976 resulted in a volume of essays with great significance for those working in demographic economics. Both are discussed for the 2 sets of essays do much to illustrate what the subdiscipline is doing and neglecting. The 1st dealt nominally with more developed countries and the 2nd purportedly with less developed countries. During the 1st period the dominant idea was neo-Malthusian with emphasis on demographic performance as a consequence of economic progress although in which direction (more children and sooner or fewer children and later) was in part a matter of choosing between the Becker/Mincer formulation of opportunity costs of parenthood and the Easterlin formulation of satisfaction with oneself or alternatively a fear that prosperity was effectively bounded. The book of the 2nd conference includes 9 essays plus a brief introduction by the editor. Each of these essays is reviewed briefly. What is most impressive about this volume are the preferences for the Iron Law of Wages/neo-Malthusian approach -- economic progress leads to demographic response and not the other way around.

This paper is designed to provide additional evidence on the positive theory of accounting policy choice by combining individual accounting principles into firm income strategies. These strategies were the dependent variable in a probit analysis where the independent variables were size, management compensation, industry concentration ratio, systematic risk, capital intensity and the total debt to total asset ratio. The results indicate that four of these factors (size, management compensation, concentration ratio, and the total debt to total asset ratio) have a significant association with the choice of a firm's income strategy. This test provides strong evidence consistent with the positive theory of accounting standard setting/choice. We also present evidence that smaller firms and/or firms in less concentrated industries do not appear to make accounting policy choice decisions that are consistent with this theory.

This study focuses on the risk-return characteristics of investments in the common stocks of U.S.–based multinational corporations (MNCs) and U.S. national corporations (NATLs). Findings follow from a comparison of the risk-adjusted performance of MNCs and NATLs using the framework of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). Results of this comparison challenge assertions of earlier writers that marginal benefits or advantages accrue from investments in MNCs as compared to NATLs.

Journal Article On the Ricardian Theory of Value: A Note Get access Luigi L. Pasinetti Luigi L. Pasinetti Università Cattolica, Milan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 48, Issue 4, October 1981, Pages 673–675, https://doi.org/10.2307/2297210 Published: 01 October 1981 Article history Received: 01 April 1981 Accepted: 01 July 1981 Published: 01 October 1981

Various aspects of the school enrollment-labor supply decision have been examined in earlier studies, including those of Bowen and Finegan (1969), Cohen, Rea, and Lerman (1970), Duncan (1965), Katz (1973), Korbel (1966) and Lerman (1972). Although these authors were aware of the joint nature of the school-work decision, typically, they used an ordinary least squares (OLS) framework with dichotomous dependent variables to analyze enrollment conditional on the labor supply decision or labor supply conditional on enrollment. Several more recent studies, such as Antos and Mellow (1978), Stephenson (1978), and Ehrenberg and Marcus (forthcoming) use multinomial logit to analyze the joint determination of labor supply and enrollment. Mallar (1976) uses a bivariate probit model to deal with the simultaneous relation between school and work. But none of these studies considers both the wage offers and job availability. There is still available no single set of estimates which considers the roles of both job availability and the wage on the joint enrollment-labor supply decision. Consider what the interrelation between wages and job availability implies for estimation of the labor force participation-school enrollment decision. To the extent that downwardly rigid wages prevent the youth labor market from clearing, one would expect both wages and job availability to influence labor supply. If one of these measures is not included in explaining labor supply, the coefficient estimated for the other measure may, for reasons well known, be biased. For example, if the wage is omitted but the unemployment variable included, and if wages and unemployment are negatively correlated, then the magnitude of the coefficient of the unemployment variable will be increased. It is also unclear on a priori grounds how job availability affects school enrollment. On the one hand, if jobs are readily available to young people, youth from poor families may be able to enroll in school, supporting themselves through part-time work. With no jobs available, some may be unable to afford school expenditures and may drop out (Bowen and Finegan, 1969, p. 404). On the other hand, readily available employment opportunities for youth may simply raise the probability of dropping out of school and working full-time. Our findings will help to determine how young people react to this influence and to other influences of the market. From the viewpoint of public policy, there are a number of reasons why it is important that the enrollment-labor supply decisions be understood, and that the separate responses to wage and job availability be isolated. For one thing, there is a tendency to discount the welfare importance of unemployment or poor labor participation for young people enrolled in school (Feldstein and Ellwood, 1979). However, the joint nature of the enrollment-labor supply decisions suggests that a high enrollment rate may not be simply a cause of low participation rates, but may be an additional symptom of adverse labor market conditions. Indeed, our results for nonwhite males support an interpretation of this kind. Second, the joint nature of the decisions also implies that public programs such as the Received for publication January 31, 1980. Revision accepted for publication December 11, 1980. * Both authors are with Dartmouth College and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The research reported here was supported by the Division of Technical Systems in the Office of Technical and Analytic Systems, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Budget, U.S. Department of Education and is part of the NBER's research program in Labor Studies. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors and not those of the National Bureau of Economic Research or of the Department of Education. We would like to thank Gary Fields, Meir Kohn, Robert Plotnick, Martin Segal and participants in the labor seminars at Harvard and at Cornell for their helpful comments.

Richard W. Leftwich, Ross L. Watts, Jerold L. Zimmerman, Voluntary Corporate Disclosure: The Case of Interim Reporting, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 19, Studies on Standardization of Accounting Practices: An Assessment of Alternative Institutional Arrangements (1981), pp. 50-77

A critique of two leading articles in the productivity and city-size literature results in revised estimates of the productivity advantages of large cities. In particular, extant estimates of the elasticity of productivity with city size are revised downward by over 100 percent for the manufacturing sector and about 25 percent for the entire urban economy. After revision, productivity advantages of larger cities are found to be much larger for the nonmanufacturing sector than for the manufacturing sector. Hence, revitalization policies for large cities should be focused on nonmanufacturing sectors.