Discussions of retirement planning and Social Security policy often focus on replacement rates, which represent retirement income or Social Security benefits relative to preretirement earnings. Replacement rates are a rule of thumb designed to simplify the process of smoothing consumption over individuals' lifetimes. Despite their widespread use, however, there is no common means of measuring r...

This study draws on prior research on corporate governance and examines whether the informativeness of earnings, proxied by the earnings±returns relationship, varies with the fraction of outside directors serving on the board and board size. The results suggest that earnings of ®rms with the smallest boards in the sample (with a minimum of ®ve board members) are perceived as being more informat...

A Sample and Variable De…nitions This appendix expands on Section II.B to provide more detailed information on the construction of our analysis samples. As described in the text, we express all monetary variables in 2010 dollars, adjusting for in ‡ation using the o¢ cial IRS in ‡ation parameters used to index the tax system. Variable De…nitions for Tax Filers. We use two earnings concepts in ou...

This article uses longitudinal data for the United States and Great Britain to examine the impact of residential mobility and childbirth on the earnings of women, their family earnings, and the related division of earnings by gender. This project is the first to compare explicitly the impact of childbirth and family migration on women's earnings, and it extends prior cross-sectional and longitu...

Previous empirical research has shown that Mexico's Oportunidades program has succeeded in increasing schooling and improving health of disadvantaged children. This paper studies the program's potential longer-term consequences for the poverty and inequality of these children. It adapts methods developed in DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) and incorporates existing experimental estimates of t...

This paper models the arrival rate of voluntary news announcements of the FTSE AllShare firms. We test to see if the earnings environment affects the volume of news announcements that firms release to the stock market. We also examine whether the other factors such as the size of a firm and the external coverage a firm receives affects the pattern of news disclosures. Our results show that firm...