Quarterly Journal of Business and Economics articles from February 1991

Quarterly Journal of Business and Economics archives from February 1991

The cyclical behavior of individual production series, 1889-1984.
February 1, 1991... 376~. 5. The mean is a less appropriate summary statistic for the data than the median because it gives more weight to a ratio of 2.0 than to a ratio of 0.5 even though the two are equally far from 1.0 in percentage terms. 6. The relative...

Corporate structure, liquidity, and investment: evidence from Japanese industrial groups.
February 1, 1991... I. INTRODUCTION This paper explores the empirical relationship between corporate financial structure and investment. Our analysis is based on the large body of theoretical work that shows that information problems in the capital market can...

Segregated schools and the mobility hypothesis: a model of local government discrimination.
February 1, 1991... I. MYRDAL'S PARADOX Between 1890 and 1910 Southern blacks were disenfranchised at the state and local level by selective enforcement of existing legislation, new suffrage restrictions, massive electoral fraud, and violence. Over the same...

Ownership, agency, and wages: an examination of franchising in the fast food industry.
February 1, 1991... A topic of controversy among economists in recent years has been whether firms adjust the level and timing of compensation to solve incentive problems. Becker and Stigler |1974~, Lazear |1981~, and others have argued that firms initially pay...

Externalities and asymmetric information.
February 1, 1991... I. INTRODUCTION In the textbook model of externalities, the size of the external effects depends solely on the quantity of the commodity produced and not upon who produces it |Pigou, 1960; Meade, 1952~. For example, it is irrelevant whether...

A test of the theory of exhaustible resources.
February 1, 1991... I. INTRODUCTION More than half a century ago Hotelling |1931~ provided a rigorous theoretical model of the dynamic behavior of private markets for exhaustible resources. After a long period of relative neglect, the theory of exhaustible...

Consumer rationality and the status quo.
February 1, 1991... Received microeconomic theory presumes rational consumers maximize utility over all commodity bundles. Recent analysis, however, suggests that a consumer's status quo may limit economic rationality, "bias" consumer decisions, and induce serious...

Equilibrium wage dispersion and interindustry wage differentials.
February 1, 1991... According to the standard competitive model of the labor market, homogeneous workers should receive equal compensation across firms. But if coordination problems in the labor market make it difficult for firms and workers to form matches, a...

Permanent income, liquidity, and adjustments of automobile stocks: evidence from panel data.
February 1, 1991... REFERENCES Bar-Ilan, Avner, and Alan S. Blinder, "The Life Cycle Permanent-Income Model and Consumer Durables," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 2149, February 1987. Bernanke, Ben, "Permanent Income, Liquidity, and...

The threat of unionization, the use of debt, and the preservation of shareholder wealth.
February 1, 1991... I. INTRODUCTION Under U. S. labor law firms cannot prohibit their employees from attempting to form a collective bargaining unit. Firms can, however, take actions to reduce the impact of collective bargaining on profits. Given the apparently...

Adverse selection in dynamic moral hazard.
February 1, 1991... This paper studies a multiperiod moral hazard problem under two assumptions: (i) contracts are subject to renegotiations; (ii) the agent's action has long-term effects. The action is also interpreted as a choice of characteristic or "type."...

Consistent wage offer and reservation wage distributions.
February 1, 1991... I. INTRODUCTION This paper examines restrictions placed on wage offer and reservation wage distributions by the requirements that they be consistent with each other and with optimizing behavior on the part of workers and firms. In the standard...

The quality of managers in centralized versus decentralized organizations.
February 1, 1991... A central task of the leadership of any organization is the choice of its successors and subordinates. Corporate presidents spend a significant part of their time selecting upper management. Tenured faculty sometimes spends months deciding...

Entry deterrence, divisionalization, and investment decisions.
February 1, 1991... In their recent and interesting paper on "Divisionalization and Entry Deterrence," Schwartz and Thompson |1986~ show that oligopolistic firms can profitably forestall entry by creating new divisions, assuming that these divisions operate...

The enforcement of equal opportunity laws under imperfect information: affirmative action and alternatives.
February 1, 1991... I. INTRODUCTION More than twenty years have passed since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act. During that period, the enforcement of Title VII, with its broad prohibition of discrimination in employment and compensation, has proved to be...