The President Versus the Senate: Appointments in the American System of Separated Powers and the Federal Reserve

For politicians, appointments are an instrument of policy influence.By installing their representatives in an institution, politicianscan count on policy influence for the duration of their appointees'terms. Given the stakes, the occasional controversy regardingnominees is understandable. On the whole, however, nominationsare not controversial; in fact, Senate confirmation votes areoften unanimous. Nevertheless, the Senate can have substantialinfluence in the appointment process. Using a formal model,this article examines how the president and Senate strategicallybargain with one another within the confines of the FederalReserve appointment process to influence monetary policy. Witha new way to estimate monetary policy preferences, this articleshows empirically that policy influence occurs via appointments.     

Labour utilisation and industrial relations at Scott-Lithgow 1967–87

This article, a case study of a Scottish shipbuilding and offshore construction company, examines the impact of management style and organisational structure on labour utilisation and industrial relations     

Unequal opportunities and public policy: The impact of parental disability benefits on child postsecondary attendance

This paper uses Canada's National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth to examine whether greater cash transfers available to parents with disabilities when their child was aged 5 to 15 increase the chances that the child will attend postsecondary education (PSE) as a young adult. We exploit differences across provinces and over time in the generosity of provincial disability benefits programs in Canada and find that higher disability benefits when the child was aged 5 to 15 years increase the probability that he or she will have attended or be attending PSE by age 19 to 25. The estimated effect size increases with the severity of the parental disability and the number of disabled parents. Because lower disability benefits significantly worsen performance of public school aged children on standardized math tests and elevate anxiety symptoms, one plausible pathway from disability benefit levels to PSE attendance may be through the cognitive and non‐cognitive skills children acquire by the age of 15. We conclude that the level of disability transfers available early in a child's life mitigates the impact of having a parent with a disability as a source of inequality of opportunity and of unequal probability of PSE participation.     

Timing the investment grade securities market: Evidence from high quality bond funds

We examine the ability of bond fund managers to shift assets between bonds and cash and across bonds of different maturities in order to capture the changes in their relative returns. As measured by estimated changes in portfolio allocations, we find strong evidence of perverse market timing ability between cash and investment grade securities, and our results indicate additional perverse timing across the bond maturity spectrum. Results are robust to an alternative performance metric. We present evidence that the survival of the majority of these funds despite their negative performance may reflect the value investors place on the portfolio diversification benefits of holding these funds.