Quarterly Journal of Economics articles from August 1994

Quarterly Journal of Economics archives from August 1994

The effect of sibling sex composition on women's education and earnings.
August 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION The American Association of University Women's recent report on girls and education carefully documents "the continuing gender gaps in educational achievement and participation" between girls and boys in today's schools [AAUW...

Credit conditions and the cyclical behavior of inventories.
August 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION This paper is motivated by three stylized facts. The first fact is that inventory movements play a major role in business cycle fluctuations. For example, Blinder and Maccini [1991] document that, in postwar U. S. recessions,...

Output fluctuations at the plant level.
August 1, 1994... The structure of firm-level output and adjustment costs is an important element of many economic theories. In business cycle theories, the shape of the cost function determines whether shocks to the economy are magnified or dampened and how their...

Anatomy of financial distress: an examination of junk-bond issuers.
August 1, 1994... When companies are in financial distress, they try to avoid bankruptcy by restructuring their assets and liabilities. Asset sales, mergers, capital expenditure reductions, and layoffs (on the asset side), and restructurings of bank debt and...

Uninsured idiosyncratic risk and aggregate saving.
August 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION This paper has two main goals. The first is to provide an exposition of models whose aggregate behavior is the result of market interaction among a large number of agents subject to idiosyncratic shocks. This class of models...

Are there cultural effects on saving? Some cross-sectional evidence.
August 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION For most of the postwar period the American national saving rate has been low by international standards. From 1970 to 1985 the average gross national saving rate in the United States (about 14 percent) was the lowest of any...

Credibility of policies versus credibility of policymakers.
August 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION There is now an extensive literature on policy credibility, credibility being defined as the expectation that an announced policy will be carried out. Much of this literature has emphasized the role of a government's "type"...

Reassessing the social returns to equipment investment. (response to J. Bradford De Long and Lawrence H. Summers, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 106, p. 445, 1991)
August 1, 1994... I. INTRODUCTION Amid growing concern about the slow rate of improvement in living standards in the United States, considerable attention has focused on the sources of economic growth and the role of investment in the growth process. A key...

Equipment investment and economic growth: reply. (response to Alan J. Auerbach et al, in this issue, p. 789)
August 1, 1994... We are surprised that the Quarterly Journal of Economics is printing the comment by Auerbach, Hassett, and Oliner [1994]. Comments are usually published when they analyze different related sources of data, or raise points of analysis and...