This research examines whether analysts' earnings forecasts incorporate information in price changes. Even if the forecasts do not explicitly depend upon price changes,there should nevertheless be a positive association between analysts' forecast revisions and prior price changes. Moreover, if analysts incorporate only their private information in formulating a forecast and ignore price changes, then the likelihood that their estimate is less than (greater than) the realization increases following price increases (decreases). Empirical results are consistent with these conjectures and indicate that analysts' forecasts do not fully reflect the information in prior price changes.

This paper analyzes the role of financial intermediaries as marketmakers in the market for interest rate swaps. We argue that intermediaries which hold large nontraded portfolios of swaps are efficient alternatives to direct hedging by counterparties in publicly traded cash and futures instruments. The efficiency afforded by the swap marketmaker derives from reduction in transactions costs, diversification of basis risk, and reduced agency costs of debt. The analysis provides an explanation for the existence and success of the swaps market as a means for spreading risk and for its dominance by large financial institutions.

Empirical models of local government unionization reveal substantial reductions in union membership due to right-to-work laws. Free riders, rather than underlying antiunion sentiments, are probably responsible because the unionization models include better measures of sentiments than right-to-work laws. Furthermore, these laws reduce the probability that bargaining unions form by more than they reduce the probability that nonbargaining associations form in three of five local government functions. These results also confirm the importance of free riders because union security clauses that prohibit free riders in states without right-to-work laws exist only in collective-bargaining contracts.

We specify a model of municipal labor demand when resource flows available to the municipality are uncertain. The model allows us to test the hypothesis that employment decisions are rational in the sense that they incorporate all available information at the time that the decisions are made. We find that, for our sample of communities, on the whole one cannot reject the hypothesis that labor demand is consistent with intertemporal utility maximization under uncertainty. However, small and large communities exhibit different behavior. The employment decisions of small communities are consistent with the model, while those of large communities are not.

Auditing, Management Advisory Services, Contracting, Economies of scope

The Market Microstructure Symposium in this issue of the Review of Financial Studies illustrates the diverse types of research being undertaken by scholars in this area of finance. The excitement and activity level reflect the overlap of a number of important ingredients, which in turn are helping to shape this subfield. The rational expectations paradigm provides a strong conceptual foundation for the theoretical analysis of problems. The development of the very powerful and tractable frameworks of Grossman and Stiglitz (1980), Glosten and Milgrom (1985), and Kyle (1985), and its extension by Admati and Pfleiderer (1988), has greatly spurred theoretical work in this area. In fact, the symposium includes the important extension of the Kyle framework to incorporate risk aversion in the Subrahmanyam (1991) article. The influence of these theoretical models of adverse selection has been enhanced by the broad recognition of the importance of adverse selection in actual security trading. The development of empirically tractable approaches for examining adverse selection [e.g., Glosten and Harris (1988)] has heightened the impact of the development of the theory. Admati (1991) provides a recent, more detailed overview of the theoretical literature on rational expectations and market microstructure.