<title>Abstract</title> <italic>Fair employment policies constrain employee selection: specifically, applicants’ professional experience can be a substitute for formal education. However, reflecting firm-specific job requirements, this substitution rule applies less strictly to applicants from outside the firm....</italic>

We empirically investigate whether increases in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) budget have an effect on firms’ compliance behavior with securities market rules. Our study uses a dataset on the SEC's resources and its enforcement actions over a period beginning shortly...