How Much Investment Choice is Enough for Members?

In recent years Australians have been given increased responsibility in making investment strategy decisions for their superannuation contributions. The investment choices superannuation funds typically offer include ready-made options with a strategic asset allocation or a "do-it-yourself option where the members choose their own asset allocation. This paper examines a sample of choices by members of a large industry fund which allows members any combination of six ready-made pools and eight asset classes. About one-quarter of these decisions involve choices which suggest a possibly naïve view of diversification unless members are conscious of resulting asset allocations.     

Long-Lived Private Information and Imperfect Competition

We develop a multi-period auction model in which multiple privately informed agents strategically exploit their long-lived information. We show that such traders compete aggressively and cause most of their common private information to be revealed very rapidly. In the limit as the interval between auctions approaches zero, market depth becomes infinite and all private information is revealed immediately. These results are in contrast to those of Kyle (1985) in which the monopolistic informed trader causes his information to be incorporated into prices gradually, and, when the interval between auctions is vanishingly small, market depth is constant over time.     

Private Benefits of Control, Ownership, and the Cross-listing Decision

This paper investigates how a foreign firm's decision to cross-list on a U.S. stock exchange is related to the consumption of private benefits of control by its controlling shareholders. Theory has proposed that when private benefits are high, controlling shareholders are less likely to choose to cross-list in the United States because of constraints on the consumption of private benefits resulting from such listings. Using several proxies for private benefits related to the control and cash flow ownership rights of controlling shareholders, we find support for this hypothesis with a sample of more than 4,000 firms from 31 countries.     

THE DOLLAR'S INTERNATIONAL ROLE

The dollar was the dominant international currency following World War II. However, as the international economy has changed in dramatic ways, the dollar's international role also has changed. Although the dollar's role has declined, it remains an important international currency. Furthermore, the world does not appear to be moving toward a tripolar monetary system. The dollar and the deutsche mark, not the yen, are the most important international currencies. The dollar's role has declined due to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973, the decline in the relative importance of the United States, and deregulation of the world financial market.     

Information search in the mutual fund market in the U.S. A.

Sequential decision-making principles are introduced which can be applied to mutual fund investing. Specific attention is given to the nature of the mutual fund market and the expected pay-off from a low-cost information search. Empirical results are based on historical returns and information that is readily available in popular press sources. Substantial variation in historical performance was found and the pay-off from a market search was positive and substantial in many cases.     

Inflation and Welfare: A Search Approach

This paper uses a search model of monetary exchange to provide new insights for evaluating the welfare costs of inflation. We first show that the search model of money can rationalize the estimates of the welfare cost of inflation based on the "welfare triangle" methodology of Bailey (1956) and Lucas (2000) provided that buyers appropriate the social marginal benefit of their real balances. For other mechanisms, the measure given by the welfare triangle has to be scaled up by a factor that increases with sellers' market power. We introduce capital and endogenous participation decisions and study how the cost of inflation is affected. We provide calibrated examples in which a deviation from the Friedman rule is optimal.     

Injured Workers' Underreporting in the Health Care Industry: An Analysis Using Quantitative, Qualitative, and Observational Data

Underreporting of occupational injuries was examined in four health care facilities using quantitative, qualitative, and observational data. Occupational Safety and Health Administration logs accounted for only one-third of the workers' compensation records; 45 percent of injured workers followed by survey had workers' compensation claims. Workers reported 63 percent of serious occupational injuries. Underreporting is explained by time pressure and workers' doubts about eligibility, reputation, income loss, and career prospects. Though aware of underreporting, managers subtly believe in workers' moral hazard behaviors.     

‘Th'ancient Distaff’ and ‘Whirling Spindle’: measuring the contribution of spinning to household earnings and the national economy in England, 1550–17701

The purpose of this article is to estimate the workforce involved in spinning from the late sixteenth century until the eve of mechanization. In addition, the potential contribution to family earnings from spinning will be examined. Just about all of the millions of yards of woollen yarn that went into making English cloth had to be spun by women and children, but this activity has not been investigated to the extent that it deserves. Spinning was a skilled occupation where there was a great demand for the best quality product. Sources exist which make it possible to make general estimates of the amount of spinning needed in the economy, and its cost. This evidence shows that employment in spinning increased dramatically from the late seventeenth century, and continued to increase until there were probably over one million women and children employed in spinning by the mid‐eighteenth century. In addition earnings increased to the extent whereby earnings from spinning could contribute over 30 per cent of household income for poorer families. This has implications for looking at trends in real wages over time, as well as for the concept of the industrious revolution.     

Improving Mineral Taxation Policy in Australia*

Australian State governments have begun to increase royalty rates and other mineral taxes. The most instructive approach to taxation policy for the minerals sector is to set up a general model of mines which year the optimal structure of taxes. A model of mine production under uncertainty is presented. The optimal tax is a single tax with two parts. a bonus bid and conditional tax payments based on the ex-post rent of the mine. The actual structure of taxes levied by State and Commonwealth governments is seen to be distinctly sub-optimal in several respects. Proposals to move the actual to word the optimal structure are made, recognizing some of the constraints on information and the maximum acceptable rate of tax reform .