How Destructive Is Creative Destruction? The Costs of Worker Displacement We analyze short and long-term effects of worker displacement. Our focus is on prime-age male workers displaced from Norwegian manufacturing plants. We find that displacement increases the probability of exiting the labor force by about 5 percentage points. This indicates that studies using data that do not incorporate wo...

On the Post-Unification Development of Public and Private Pay in Germany German post-unification in the 1990s is a period that was marked by substantial economic change, part of which was East German wages building towards the much higher West German levels. This paper studies the public-private pay gap in the fast changing economic and political environment of the 1990s using panel estimation ...

We show that abnormal trading activity increases in the days before earnings announcements, especially for stocks with high dispersion of opinions. Consistent with the theory of Miller (1977) and other disagreement models, for stocks that are also short sale constrained, this increased speculative trading is dominated by net buyer-initiated trading activity. This evidence helps to explain why s...

Laterborns Don’t Give Up: The Effects of Birth Order on Earnings in Europe While it is well known that birth order affects educational attainment, less is known about its effects on earnings. Using data from eleven European countries for males born between 1935 and 1956, we show that firstborns enjoy on average a 13.7 percent premium over laterborns in their wage at labour market entry. However...

Conventional models of equilibrium unemployment typically imply that proportional taxes on labor earnings are neutral with respect to unemployment as long as the tax does not affect the replacement rate provided by unemployment insurance, i.e., unemployment benefits relative to after-tax earnings. When home production is an option, the conventional results may no longer hold. This paper uses a ...

Aim/purpose – This paper aims at investigating whether the International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 15 Revenue from Contracts with Customers implementation in Poland has affected earnings management that uses discretion revenue recognition to avoid losses and decreases. Design/methodology/approach The empirical studies were conducted using a sample of 80 entities four industries listed...

In housing markets, neighborhood characteristics are a key source of information heterogeneity: sellers are usually better informed about neighborhood values than buyers are, but some sellers and buyers are better informed than their peers are. Consistent with predictions from a new framework for analyzing such markets with heterogeneous assets and differentially informed agents, we find that c...

Is investment constrained more by insecure property rights or by limited external finance? For five transition economies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union we find that weak property rights limit the reinvestment of profits in startup manufacturing firms. Access to credit does not appear to explain differences in investment. At least in the early stages of post-communist reform, reta...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of the timing of bank failure/merger in 10 Asian countries over the period of 1999-2007 using a multivariate logit model and a split population duration analysis. Apart from bank-specific information, we also focus on the effects of macroeconomic and financial characteristics. The following empirical findings are obtained. First, the resu...