The Effect of Separation Bonuses on Voluntary Quits: Evidence from the Military's Downsizing

This paper analyzes the decision of mid-career personnel to voluntarily leave the U.S. military in response to a financial incentive program. A model of the separation decision is tested using data on Navy and Air Force enlisted personnel who were targeted for the buyout in 1992. Two alternative estimates are provided, one from a fixed effects model and one from a structural, annualized cost of leaving model. Our basic results indicate the financial incentive had a modest effect in inducing additional quits. The impact of the separation bonus, however, was much larger for occupations facing a threat of involuntary layoff.     

Bond immunization for additive interest rate shocks

This paper explores bond immunization for additive term structure models. This class of term structures contains many models that are commonly used in the duration and immunization literature. We establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for immunization and prove the existence of a bond portfolio that satisfies the immunization condition. Based upon the immunization condition, we develop a general definition of duration that applies to any additives term structure model.     

Fund Advisor Compensation in Closed-End Funds

This paper examines the relation between the premium on closed-end funds and organizational features of the funds and advisors, including the compensation scheme of the investment advisor. We find that the fund premium is larger when: (a) the advisor's compensation is more sensitive to fund performance; (b) the assets managed by the advisor are concentrated in the fund in question; (c) the advisor manages other funds with low compensation sensitivity to performance and with low concentration of assets managed by the advisor; and (d) the advisor's compensation contract evaluates performance relative to a benchmark.     

The Demand for Hedging and the Value of Hedging Opportunities

Hedging strategies typically assume that hedging is costless and that only one futures market exists. When these assumptions are dropped, the demand for hedging is shown to depend on basis risk, price risk, and the hedger's risk preference. The marginal and incremental value of hedging opportunities are computed for the general cases of one and two markets and applied to the specific case of Pennsylvania dairy input hedging.     

Economic and social conditions of blacks in New York during reconstruction

Summary At a time when, despite Affirmative Action Goals, we still have great difficulty in making employers accountable before the law for overt acts of discrimination, it is well to recall the doughty struggle of the state’s Blacks versus employers. At a time when health services for inner-city residents continue to be worse than provisions for other citizens, it is well to remember that even in the last century “the conditions of sickness and mortality” were “not the same for the white and for the colored races,” and destitution among Blacks in New York City accounted for some 37 percent of the illnesses among Blacks in that area. At a time when realtors and boards of education still effectively put up barriers to ordinary social relations between whites and Blacks it is well to remember that even after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment Blacks were powerless to cause any major breach in public constraints to their mobility. Blacks have been powerless for a long time to make legislated freedom subserve their economic and social goals, and this is an important reminder to those who would reapply the methods of the past in attempts to fulfill today the normal economic expectations of citizens of the Republic.