Quarterly Journal of Economics articles from February 1998

Quarterly Journal of Economics archives from February 1998

Default and renegotiation: a dynamic model of debt.
February 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Although there is a vast literature on capital structure, economists do not yet have a fully satisfactory theory of debt finance (or of the differences between debt and equity). One of the reasons for this is that debt is a...

Measuring positive externalities from unobservable victim precaution: an empirical analysis of Lojack.
February 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION The enormous resources devoted to the criminal justice system are well documented. Prison populations have more than tripled in the last two decades, with roughly 1.5 million Americans now behind bars. Total government spending...

Why do firms train? Theory and evidence.
February 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION A large portion of human capital accumulation in the form of training and on-the-job learning takes place inside firms. Becker [1964] and Mincer [1974] provide a systematic explanation of training investments and the associated...

Investment tax incentives, prices, and the supply of capital goods.
February 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Investment is of paramount importance for both business cycle fluctuations and long-term economic growth, so it is not surprising that the United States has repeatedly changed depreciation allowances, corporate tax rates, and...

Fiscal year ends and nonlinear incentive contracts: the effect on business seasonality.
February 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION The fiscal year is an important unit of operation for most American companies because budgeting and financial reporting conform to fiscal calendars. The fiscal year is also the unit of time over which many bonus and...

The choice of stock ownership structure: agency costs, monitoring, and the decision to go public.
February 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Much existing literature in corporate finance focuses on public companies with a large number of dispersed shareholders and entrenched managers who effectively control the company. In this situation, typical of many large...

Regionalism and multilateralism: a political economy approach.
February 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION The recent revival of interest in preferential trading arrangements (PTAs), described here simply as "regionalism" even though some of them are not regional, e.g., the U. S.-Israel Free Trade agreement, especially in the shape...

Income, schooling, and ability: evidence from a new sample of identical twins.
February 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Understanding the role of genetic and family background factors is a critical component of most public policy discussions about the effectiveness of investments in education. Attempts to understand the influence of schooling on...

The economic consequences of parental leave mandates: lessons from Europe.
February 1, 1998... Over 100 countries have enacted some form of parental leave policies, with most assuring at least two to three months of paid job absences [Kamerman 1991]. Nevertheless, the effects of providing rights to time off work in the period surrounding...

Growth empirics: a panel data approach - a comment.
February 1, 1998... The literature concerned with the econometric analysis of international growth and convergence has accommodated cross-country heterogeneity in a sequence of stages. At first, the cross-sectional analyses of Barro [1991] and Mankiw, Romer, and...

Growth empirics: a panel data approach - a reply. (response to article by Kevin Lee, M. Hashem Pesaran and Ron Smith in this issue, p. 319)
February 1, 1998... Research on convergence has indeed proceeded through several stages. In the first, represented by such works as Baumol [1986], convergence was studied under the implicit assumption that all countries of the sample had the same steady state levels...