Inequality has social costs: it may engender political divisions, aggravate crime, and lead low-income families into poverty from which they or their children may not emerge. Dramatic shifts in relative well-being therefore demand attention. In the late. 1980s, economists discovered that the earnings of highand low-wage workers were rapidly diverging (Levy and Murnane 1992). Chart 1 plots earni...

Companies making initial public offerings in Greece were obliged to include next year‟s profit in the new issue prospectuses until the regulations changed to voluntary status. This study takes advantage of these two regulatory regimes and compares the accuracy of earnings forecasts under both mandatory and voluntary disclosure environments. Findings indicate behavioural change, as pessimistic e...

EGISLATION is being considered which would allow depository financial institutions throughout the nation to offer to households interest-paying checking accounts, more popularly known as NOW (Negotiable Order of Withdrawal) accounts. Bankers, in general, are concerned about the effects on earnings of such a regulatory change. Several studies of NOW accounts, however, suggest that this concern m...

Under the retirement earnings test, Social Security benefits are reduced if earnings exceed specified amounts, although the benefit reduction is partly offset by future benefit increases. By imposing a tax on the earnings of beneficiaries, the earnings test provided a disincentive for them to supplement retirement income by working. The Senior Citizens Freedom to Work Act of 2000 eliminated the...

E xchange rate is an important factor influencing price indices of exported goods of a country in different ways. Imported intermediate commodity is one of the important ways by which the change in exchange rate affects price indices of the exported goods. Using the input-output table of Iran for the year 2001, this paper investigates the impact of exchange rate devaluation on price ...

Russia provides an interesting context for studying the labor market experiences of the elderly because of its experience with market transition, its looming growth in the elderly dependency ratio, and its unusual pension policies that do not penalize pensioners for working. We use data from twenty surveys of the Russian population conducted from February 1991 to November 2007 to analyze the la...

The interaction between the various departments of a full-service brokerage firm can have positive effects. An asset management department operates the firm’s mutual funds and has a need for high-quality information. Thus, the firm’s sell-side analysts in the research department are motivated to gather information about particular securities and to use the asset management department as an addi...

This paper surveys the literature on the determinants and consequences of securities class action lawsuits against firms and auditors from a financial reporting quality perspective. The survey is motivated by the important role that law plays in protecting stakeholders’ interests against managerial misdeed. Litigation is, thus, an important topic and numerous studies investigate the determinant...

This paper investigates the nature and consequences of sample attrition in a unique longitudinal survey of medical doctors. We describe the patterns of non-response and examine if attrition affects the econometric analysis of medical labour market outcomes using the estimation of physician earnings equations as a case study. We compare the econometric gestimates obtained from a number of differ...