CHARTER SCHOOL COMPETITION AND ITS IMPACT ON EMPLOYMENT SPENDING IN MICHIGAN'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

This paper seeks to determine how competition from charter schools affects a broad range of employees including instructors, administrators, and support personnel. Three empirical models are estimated utilizing a panel data from Michigan: a fixed effect model, a fixed effect model with lagged dependent variable, and an instrumental variable model. The key findings are that when a school district faces competition from charter schools they spend a larger percentage on instructors (most likely most of this is going toward teachers and not teacher aides), while spending a smaller percentage on employees that support instructors. The models seem to imply that the increased spending on teachers may not be reflected in a salary increase. (JEL H52, H75, I21, I22)     

WAITING TIME AS A PRICE FOR DECEASED DONOR KIDNEYS*

Kidney transplant candidates can obtain organs immediately from living donors or wait for deceased donor organs. I hypothesize that as waiting time for deceased donor organs increases, more patients will seek living donors. I estimate the impact of the availability of deceased donor organs on the use of living donor transplantation. The model, which is identified using within‐region variation in the demand for and supply of kidneys, shows evidence of a substitution effect. A five unit increase in the supply of deceased donor kidneys will result in one fewer living donor transplant for a net increase of four transplants. (JEL I18, H44, D45)     

Chief Executive Officer Equity Incentives and Accounting Irregularities

This study examines whether Chief Executive Officer (CEO) equity‐based holdings and compensation provide incentives to manipulate accounting reports. While several prior studies have examined this important question, the empirical evidence is mixed and the existence of a link between CEO equity incentives and accounting irregularities remains an open question. Because inferences from prior studies may be confounded by assumptions inherent in research design choices, we use propensity‐score matching and assess hidden (omitted variable) bias within a broader sample. In contrast to most prior research, we do not find evidence of a positive association between CEO equity incentives and accounting irregularities after matching CEOs on the observable characteristics of their contracting environments. Instead, we find some evidence that accounting irregularities occur less frequently at firms where CEOs have relatively higher levels of equity incentives.     

A New Data Set on Monetary Policy: The Economic Forecasts of Individual Members of the FOMC

This paper describes a new data set of the forecasts of output growth, inflation, and unemployment prepared by individual members of the Federal Open Market Committee. The paper discusses the scope of the data set, possibilities for extending it, and some potential uses. It offers a preliminary examination of some of the cross‐sectional features of the data.     

Concern with Immediate Consequences Magnifies the Impact of Compulsive Buying Tendencies on College Students' Credit Card Debt

This research examines whether temporal orientation moderates the impact of compulsive buying tendencies (CBT) on credit card debt. Participants completed the consideration of future consequences scale, a compulsive buying scale, and reported their credit card debt. Results revealed that CBT mediated the relationship between concern with immediate consequences and credit card debt, and high concern with immediate consequences magnified the impact of CBT on credit card debt. This suggests that compulsive buyers who focus on maximizing immediate consequences are at a much higher risk of building up significant amounts of credit card debt.     

CAN SOFT DRINK TAXES REDUCE POPULATION WEIGHT?

Soft drink consumption has been hypothesized as one of the major factors in the growing rates of obesity in the United States. Nearly two-thirds of all states currently tax soft drinks using excise taxes, sales taxes, or special exceptions to food exemptions from sales taxes to reduce consumption of this product, raise revenue, and improve public health. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of changes in state soft drink taxes on body mass index (BMI), obesity, and overweight. Our results suggest that soft drink taxes influence BMI, but that the impact is small in magnitude. ( JEL I18, H75)     

Why Does the Law Matter? Investor Protection and Its Effects on Investment,Finance, and Growth

Investor protection is associated with greater investment sensitivity to q and lower investment sensitivity to cash flow. Finance plays a role in causing these effects; in countries with strong investor protection, external finance increases more strongly with q, and declines more strongly with cash flow. We further find that q and cash flow sensitivities are associated with ex post investment efficiency; investment predicts growth and profits more strongly in countries with greater q sensitivities and lower cash flow sensitivities. The paper's findings are broadly consistent with investor protection promoting accurate share prices, reducing financial constraints, and encouraging efficient investment.     

Immigration of Nurses

This paper examines the effects of immigration on a specific occupation, registered nurses (RNs). To learn whether immigrant nurses reduced the earnings of RNs, we applied techniques developed by Goldin (1994) and Borjas, Freeman, and Katz (1996), but found the effect of immigrant penetration either positive or insignificant. We also found that the supply of immigrant RNs was far more elastic than the supply coming from natives. It is often argued that it will be hard to detect negative effects on wages and employment of natives in local markets, because natives will avoid a market which many immigrants have entered. This study finds no support for this hypothesis in this market, based on data that measures the rate of entry of RNs exactly. We find no adverse effect of immigration on native workers in this occupation.     

CONTRACTING FOR AN INNOVATION UNDER BILATERAL ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION*

We analyze licensing contracts between informed innovators and developers exerting profit‐increasing effort. Those contracts must simultaneously induce innovators to convey information on the value of their ideas, while inducing developers to exert effort and protecting the innovators' intellectual property rights. We show that the best innovators signal themselves by taking more royalties even if it reduces the developers' share of returns and their incentives. Moreover, royalties are more likely to be used when property rights are easy to enforce and pre‐contractual evidence on innovation quality is hard to produce.     

TIME CONSISTENCY AND SELLER COMMITMENT IN INTERTEMPORAL MOVIE DISTRIBUTION: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF THE VIDEO WINDOW*

We study the determinants of the ‘video window’ (the interval between a movie's theatrical and video releases), based on a sample of 1,157 films released on video between 1988 and 1997. For subsets of films having shorter theater run lengths (1 to 17 weeks), windows were generally longer than, and largely invariant to, measures of the time required to exhaust the theater market. One interpretation of our results is that U.S. movie distributors resolved a time consistency problem by coordinating their behavior to maintain longer windows than would have otherwise resulted, but different explanations are also plausible.