Individuals involved in basic research, like other workers, respond to incentives. Funding agencies provide implicit incentives when they specify the rules by which awards are made. The following analysis is an exercise in understanding incentives at an applied level. Specific rules are examined. What is the effect of rewarding past effort? What happens when a few large awards are replaced by many small awards? How does the timing of an award affect effort? How does an agency choose which topics to fund? Socially optimal rules are derived.

This article explores the determinants of full‐time and part‐time reemployment following job displacement in Canada. Among those who lose full‐time jobs, women are found to have both longer median joblessness durations and higher probabilities of part‐time reemployment than men with little of this difference explained by gender differences in worker characteristics. Unemployment insurance receipt is associated with longer median joblesness durations and, among those who find a job within 1 year of displacement, an increased probability of part‐time reemployment for both men and women.

Our simulation results show that tests for long-horizon (i.e.. multi-year) abnormal security returns around firm-specific events are severely misspecified. The rejection frequencies using parametric tests sometimes exceed 30% when the significance level of the test is 5%. Our results are robust to many different abnormal-return models. Conclusions from long-horizon studies require extreme caution. Nonparametric and bootstrap tests are likely to reduce misspecification.

We examine a sample of 5896 stocks listed on Nasdaq between 1974 and 1988 to see whether the price per share has significant statistical power in forecasting subsequent returns and attrition rates. Consistent with anecdotal evidence, we document a higher mortality rate for lower-priced stocks than for higher-priced issues. Surprisingly, mortality is not related to market capitalization. Our results also hold for subsamples partitioned by industry and issue year. On average, investors are not adequately compensated for this additional mortality risk, earning lower risk-adjusted rates of return on portfolios of lower-priced shares than on portfolios of higher-priced shares.

Two core meanings of “utility” are distinguished. “Decision utility” is the weight of an outcome in a decision. “Experienced utility” is hedonic quality, as in Bentham's usage. Experienced utility can be reported in real time (instant utility), or in retrospective evaluations of past episodes (remembered utility). Psychological research has documented systematic errors in retrospective evaluations, which can induce a preference for dominated options. We propose a formal normative theory of the total experienced utility of temporally extended outcomes. Measuring the experienced utility of outcomes permits tests of utility maximization and opens other Unes of empirical research.