HOW ENDAs EXTEND THE WORKWEEK: LEGAL PROTECTION AND THE LABOR SUPPLY OF BEHAVIORALLY GAY MEN

Employment Nondiscrimination Acts (ENDAs) have received much political attention in the recent past. Despite the political attention, very little research has investigated the impact of ENDAs. I analyze the impact of ENDAs on labor supplies, which is under‐researched in the policy analysis literature. My work is the first to investigate the labor supply patterns of behaviorally gay men using data that are representative of the entire behaviorally gay population. I show that ENDAs motivate behaviorally gay men to work roughly 15–20 h more per week and increase the probability that behaviorally gay men will supply any labor by approximately 7%. These results suggest that ENDAs increase the labor supply of behaviorally gay workers by increasing workplace tolerance of homosexuality. (JEL J2, J7, J1)     

An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Rounding on the SPF Probabilities of Decline and Output Growth Histograms

I consider the possibility that respondents to the Survey of Professional Forecasters round their probability forecasts of the event that real output will decline in the future, as well as their reported output growth probability distributions. I make various plausible assumptions about respondents’ rounding practices, and show how these impinge upon the apparent mismatch between probability forecasts of a decline in output and the probabilities of this event implied by the annual output growth histograms. I find that rounding accounts for about a quarter of the inconsistent pairs of forecasts.     

Why Does Return Predictability Concentrate in Bad Times?

We build an equilibrium model to explain why stock return predictability concentrates in bad times. The key feature is that investors use different forecasting models, and hence assess uncertainty differently. As economic conditions deteriorate, uncertainty rises and investors' opinions polarize. Disagreement thus spikes in bad times, causing returns to react to past news. This phenomenon creates a positive relation between disagreement and future returns. It also generates time‐series momentum, which strengthens in bad times, increases with disagreement, and crashes after sharp market rebounds. We provide empirical support for these new predictions.     

What Shapes Assessment of Ability to Pay for Children's College Education?

Many parents have concerns about the cost of their child's college and lack information about preparing for those expenses. Parents' assessment of ability to pay for college are likely to influence their investments in a child's education, and may in turn affect the child's educational commitment and attainment. These potential outcomes lead us to investigate what accounts for parents' assessment. We use logistic regression to analyze data collected from mothers with newborn children (N = 2,566). The findings demonstrate that the mother's assessment of ability to pay for the child's education are significantly associated with material hardship experiences, financial management skills, educational expectations, and her education level. We discuss research and policy implications of promoting positive financial assessment for college early.     

VIDEO GAMES AND CRIME

Psychological studies find that video game play is associated with markers for violent and antisocial attitudes. It is plausible that these markers indicate either whetted or sated preferences for antisocial behavior. I investigate whether a proxy for video gaming is associated with the prevalence of various crimes and find evidence that gaming is associated with significant declines in crime and death rates. These results are robust to various alternative specifications. Other youth‐related leisure activities—sports and movie viewing—generate smaller or no effects. These results cast doubt on the desirability of proposed restrictions on video game marketing. (JEL L86, D18, I18)     

Farmer Gone Fish'n? Swidden Decline and the Rise of Grouper Fishing on Palawan Island,the Philippines

Considerable research has focused on understanding how upland farmers adjust land‐based livelihoods to the influences of agrarian change in Southeast Asia. In the process, an ‘upland bias’ has emerged where researchers focus narrowly on the uplands as localities with distinct, coherent features, neglecting how families engage place, social relations and ethnicity as they access opportunities in proximate spaces. This paper considers how the Tagbanua – long considered an upland swidden people – have ‘stepped back’ from swidden agriculture due to declining yields and debt to harvest the lucrative grouper (e.g. Plectropomus leopardus). We show how Tagbanua families on Palawan Island have adjusted swidden as they negotiate social relations, ethnic cleavages and economic barriers to effectively engage the grouper industry. Rather than cast such farmers and fishers as ideal types in place, we argue that how they negotiate social relations creates new livelihood opportunities in varied environments, reinforcing the dynamic, recursive context of agrarian change.     

Investor behaviour in a nascent capital market: Scottish bank shareholders in the nineteenth century

This article uses the records of nineteenth‐century Scottish banks in an attempt to understand investor behaviour in the early British capital market. It presents four main findings, some of which do not conform to the basic assumptions of standard asset pricing theories. First, in an era when efficient portfolio diversification was not possible, the intrinsic risk of an equity security was an important input into investor decision‐making. Second, our evidence suggests that businesspeople initially regarded bank stock as a consumption good, as being a stockholder gave them privileged access to bank finance. When bank lending practices changed in the middle of the century, this access‐to‐credit advantage associated with owning bank stock largely disappeared. Third, investors typically exhibited a bias towards banks that conducted business in the areas where they resided. Fourth, a sizeable proportion of investors were stockholders in more than one bank.     

Substitutes for legal protection: corporate governance and dividends in Victorian Britain1

Companies in Victorian Britain operated in a laissez‐faire legal environment from the perspective of outside investors, implying that such investors were not protected by the legal system. This article seeks to identify the alternative mechanisms that outside shareholders used to protect themselves by examining the dividend policy and governance of over 800 publicly traded companies at the beginning of the 1880s. We assess the importance of these mechanisms by estimating their impact on Tobin's Q. Our evidence suggests that dividends and well‐structured and incentivized boards of directors may have played a role in protecting the interests of outside investors.