Quarterly Journal of Economics articles from May 1999

Quarterly Journal of Economics archives from May 1999

Contracting with externalities.
May 1, 1999... INTRODUCTION Many contracting situations involve multilateral externalities. To give a few examples, a shareholder tendering his shares to a superior corporate raider has a positive externality on other shareholders [Grossman and Hart...

Career concerns of mutual fund managers.
May 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION A side effect of the growth of the mutual fund industry in recent years has been increased attention paid to the internal workings of fund companies. Among the most dramatic stories of the last several years was the...

Consumption and portfolio decisions when expected returns are time varying.
May 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION The choice of an optimal portfolio of assets is a classic problem in financial economics. In a single-period setting the problem is well understood, and analytical solutions for optimal portfolio weights are available in...

Experimental estimates of education production functions.
May 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION The large literature on the effect of school resources on student achievement generally finds ambiguous, conflicting, and weak results. Even quantitative summaries of the literature tend to reach conflicting conclusions....

Using Maimonides' rule to estimate the effect of class size on scholastic achievement.
May 1, 1999... When asked about their views on class size in surveys, parents and teachers generally report that they prefer smaller classes. This may be because those involved with teaching believe that smaller classes promote student learning, or simply...

Do better schools matter? Parental valuation of elementary education.
May 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION Parents are not the only ones interested in the quality of schools. Economists, educators, and policy makers, too, have long been interested in the value of better schools in order to assess a number of school reforms. Many...

Psychological factors and stock option exercise.
May 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION In this paper we seek to understand what leads employees to exercise the stock options given to them by their firm. In particular, we examine whether psychological factors influence exercise decisions above and beyond the...

Is bank supervision central to central banking?
May 1, 1999... While the importance of central bank independence for the conduct of monetary policy has been the subject of numerous empirical studies (see, for example, Cukierman [1992], Alesina and Summers [1993], Posen [1995], and Fuhrer [1997]),...

State-dependent pricing and the general equilibrium dynamics of money and output.
May 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION If there are fixed costs to changing prices, the timing and magnitude of an individual firm's price adjustment depends on the state of the economy. The effects of nominal disturbances on aggregate real activity will,...

Pricing the limits to growth from minerals depletion.
May 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION Spurred by the "energy crisis," a severe loss of confidence erupted on the world scene of the 1970s concerning the planet's ability to cope with exhaustion of nonrenewable resources such as oil. The ensuing debate about...