Unionization in Australia: Evidence from the AWIRS*

This article uses workplace level data from the recent Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey to test a simple demand and supply model explaining the level of union membership within Australia The findings suggest that previous research using individual-level data has understated the importance of the supply-side in influencing union membership. In particular, unionization levels were found to be highly sensitive to firm size, to the number of unions represented in the workplace and to management attitudes     

Informational Efficiency and Information Subsets

This paper proposes a new definition of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis with respect to information, which is more formal and precise than those of Rubinstein 13 , Fama 4 , Jensen 6 , and Beaver 1 , and which fits well as a framework for interpreting the many tests of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis in the literature. Security markets are here considered “efficient with respect to information set ?” if and only if revealing ? to all agents would change neither equilibrium prices nor portfolios. In addition to other desirable features, this definition has the “subset property”: efficiency with respect to ? implies efficiency with respect to any subset of ?.     

The Controllability of Financial Outcomes

Accounting performance measures that capture results not controlled by the person being evaluated may be dysfunctional. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for identifying situations in which outcomes are captured by such measures as are more (less) likely to be controllable. Results of a questionnaire survey support the claim that as task uncertainty increases, individuals perceive less control over financial outcomes.     

Is There a Window of Opportunity for Seasoned Equity Issuance?

The aggregate volume of equity issues is used to search for periods when seasoned equity capital can be raised at favorable terms. We find that the price reaction to equity issue announcements in high equity issue volume (HOT) periods is approximately 200 basis points lower on average than in low equity issue volume (COLD) periods. The lower price reaction in hot markets is economically important and is independent of the macroeconomic characteristics of hot and cold markets. The evidence supports the existence of windows of opportunity for equity issues that result at least partially from reduced levels of asymmetric information.     

The Effect of Money Shocks on Interest Rates in the Presence of Conditional Heteroskedasticity

Most current empirical work finds no evidence that money shocks lower interest rates. We show that these nonresults are mainly due to a failure to model the conditional heteroskedasticity of interest rates. Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) models find a significant liquidity effect where ordinary least squares (OLS) models do not. The existence of a liquidity effect is found using different models and sample periods when ARCH models are used in estimation, but never when OLS is employed.     

An Experimental Market's Investigation of Discretionary Financial Disclosure

The extent to which market forces can induce full financial disclosure by managers has long been an issue of interest to regulators. Investigating this phenomenon with naturally occurring data produces a major obstacle: since managers' private information sets are unknown, it is necessary to make assumptions about them in order to interpret the nature (e.g., favourable or unfavourable, income increasing or income decreasing) of the information that is disclosed. The validity of the inferences relies critically on the validity of these assumptions. The present study uses a laboratory experiment to test three hypotheses derived from prior analytical and empirical research: (H1) When disclosure costs are zero, managers voluntarily disclose all (good and bad) news; (H2) When disclosure costs are positive. managers only disclose news which exceeds some threshold: and (H3) The mandatory disclosure of non-proprietary information induces an increase in the disclosure of correlated. proprietary information. One hundred and fifty-six subjects participated in markets with one firm manager and three investors. Over thirteen independent periods, the managers decided whether to truthfully disclose the liquidation value of the asset under their stewardship, and the investors submitted competing bids for the asset. With costless disclosure. investors price-protected themselves when managers withheld information, but the price penalty that they imposed was insufficient to induce full disclosure. With positive disclosure cost, investors reduced the price penalty that they imposed for non-disclosure, and managers disclosed proportionally fewer of the less extreme good news. Finally, mandatory disclosure of information had no significant impact on the voluntary disclosure of correlated proprietary information. Discussion centres on our failure to support the (equilibrium) prediction from analytical research that full disclosure should obtain when disclosures are costless. Several limitations of the study are examined. and it remains an open question whether additional trials (periods) in the present study might have provided full disclosure.     

The Long‐Run Fisher Effect: Can It Be Tested?

In this paper, I provide a plausible explanation as to why past studies have been unable to find support for the long-run Fisher effect. My argument is that exogenous shocks to the inflation rates in industrialized economies have not produced the permanent change to inflation necessary for testing the Fisher effect. Instead of finding a nonstationary, unit-root process for inflation like previous Fisher effect studies, here each country's inflation rate is found to follow a mean-reverting, fractionally integrated, long-memory process. Applying a bivariate, maximum likelihood estimator to a multivariate, fractionally integrated model of inflation and nominal interest, I find that the estimated inflation rates in 17 developed countries are highly persistent, fractionally integrated, mean-reverting processes with order of integration parameters significantly less than one. Since a permanent change to inflation has not occurred, a test of whether a permanent change to inflation affects the nominal interest rate one-for-one will be uninformative as to the truth or fallacy of the Fisher effect hypothesis.     

Cheap Credit,Lending Operations,and International Politics: The Case of Global Microfinance

The provision of subsidized credit to financial institutions is an important and frequently used policy tool of governments and central banks. To assess its effectiveness, we exploit changes in international bilateral political relationships that generate shocks to the cost of financing for microfinance institutions (MFIs). MFIs that experience politically driven reductions in total borrowing costs hire more staff and increase administrative expenses. Cheap credit leads to greater profitability for MFIs and promotes a shift toward noncommercial loans but has no effect on total overall lending. Instead, the additional resources are either directed to promoting future growth or dissipated.     

Estimation of Implicit Bankruptcy Costs

This paper presents a new methodology, quasilinear estimation, for efficiently estimating economic variables reflected in the prices of corporate securities. For example, ex ante bankruptcy costs are not directly observable, however, if these costs are sufficiently large, then current security prices are affected and bankruptcy costs can be indirectly measured. When bankruptcy costs and other relevant parameters are known, there are many numerical solution techniques that can be used to determine security prices. One technique, the method of lines, is compatible with quasilinear estimation, which has been employed extensively in the physical sciences for the estimation of coefficients in differential equation models. We demonstrate that quasilinear estimation is a potentially reliable and efficient technique for the estimation of corporate bankruptcy costs and the asset variance from security prices.