This paper derives the value of PBGC pension insurance under two scenarios of interest. The first allows for voluntary plan termination, which appears to be legal under current statutes. In the second scenario, termination is prohibited unless the firm is bankrupt. Optimal pension funding...

Apparent mean reversion and excess volatility in stock market prices can be reconciled with the Efficient Market Hypothesis by specifying investor preferences that give rise to the demand for portfolio insurance. Therefore, several supposed macro anomalies can be shown to be consistent with a...

This paper focuses on a few directions in which protective labor legislation might be expanded in the United States over the next decade and the implications of expansion in each area for labor markets. Specifically, it addresses the areas of hours of work, unjust dismissal, comparable worth,...

This paper provides an analysis and summary of the effects of the Workers' Compensation (WC) system on wages and work injury experience. It stresses how lessons learned from other forms of social insurance can be applied to research on WC. I begin with a brief overview of the characteristics of...

This paper addresses three academic labor market issues; the declining salaries of faculty employed at public colleges and universities relative to their private institution counterparts, the growing dispersion of average faculty salaries across academic institutions within both the public and...

This paper presents a survey of the small, but growing, empirical literature by economists on the consequences of comparable worth. It discusses in turn studies of comparable worth's effects (or potential effects) on the male/female earnings gap, on female employment, on female labor supply and...

This study utilizes data from a number of sources to estimate how lawyers' starting salaries relate to their ability, the quality of law school they attended, and whether the law school was a private institution. Based upon this analysis, a benefit-cost analysis is conducted of the value of...

We investigate three facets of cross-sectional variation in the risk of stock price crashes: actual crash incidence, and two predictors of that risk, accounting opacity and the option smirk curve. We show that all three of these variables are related. Option smirks and accounting opacity each...

We show that a pattern of earnings management in bank financial statements has little bearing on downside risk during quiet periods, but seems to have a big impact during a financial crisis. More aggressive earnings managers prior to 2007 exhibit substantially higher risk once the financial...