bank monitoring and the pricing of corporate public debt1 we examine whether the existence of a bank firm relationship lowers the cost of public debt financing using a sample of first public straight debt o ers we test the crossmonitoring e ect of bank debt and diamond s 1991 journal of political economy 99 689 721 reputation building argument we find that the existence of bank debt lowers the at issue yield spreads for first public straight bond o ers by about 68 basis points on average consistent with diamond s reputation building argument we document that firm reputation is negatively related to the at issue yield spread for initial public debt o ers 1999 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

labor supply responses and welfare effects of tax reforms during the late 1 980s and early 1 990s taxation of wage income has undergone a change towards a proportional tax regime in many countries our analysis shows that gradual tax reforms in norway may have removed some of the distortions on worker behavior moreover we find that proportional taxes may reduce the inequality in the distribution of disposable household income yet when the distributional consequences are related to changes in individual welfare we find that rich households may benefit far more than households at the other tail of the income distribution because they earn more without any significant increase in effort

allocation of individuals to job levels under rationing summary we augment an ordered response model for the job level at which individuals desire to work with allowance for individual reporting of a discrepancy between actual and desired job level and we also investigate possible biases from restricting the observations to the employed and omitting the unemployed we find that the latter bias can be ignored and interpret this as evidence that the unemployed are not choosier than the employed people claiming inadequate capability utilization are not markedly differently allocated than those claiming a proper match women s lower job levels cannot be explained from rationing by capability utilization

institutional quality and capital inflows theory and evidence abstract this paper analyzes both theoretically and empirically the link between capital inflows and the quality of economic institutions to this purpose we construct a small open economy model of the soft budget constraint syndrome wherein persistently cheap funding from abroad i raises the prevalence of extractive projects and ii expands their support by the benevolent government ex post while the government may in principle limit the prevalence of extractive projects ex ante the incentives to do so is limited when foreign borrowing is cheap using a large sample of countries and controlling for reverse causality and omitted variable bias we confirm empirically that capital inflows are followed by a decline in the quality of domestic economic institutions our model and empirical analysis help explain the divergence between southern european countries spain portugal italy and greece and the rest of oecd countries since the mid 1990s

the sword and the shield the economics of targeted sanctions abstract how effective are smart sanctions in imposing costs on an adversary we consider this question in a model where a targeted regime may choose to shield strategically important firms from harm using detailed firm and individual data we estimate the impact on firm performance from smart sanctions deployed by the u s and eu against russia beginning in 2014 we find significant losses in operating revenue asset values and employees for sanctioned firms relative to their non sanctioned peers which are greater in sectors dependent upon western service inputs strategic firms systemically outperform non strategic firms under sanctions implying a cost of shielding to the regime that adds substantially to the total cost of sanctions jel f5

bank information monopolies and the mix of private and public debt claims this article examines the determinants of the mix of private and public debt using detailed information on the debt structure of 250 publicly traded corporations from 1980 through 1990 we find that the relationship between bank borrowing and the importance of growth opportunities depends on the number of banks the firm uses and whether the firm has public debt outstanding for firms with a single bank relationship the reliance on bank debt is negatively related to the importance of growth opportunities in contrast among firms borrowing from multiple banks the relationship is positive

labour supply in italy an empirical analysis of joint household decisions with taxes and quantity constraints this study applies an econometric framework which allows for complex non convex budget sets highly non linear labour supply curves and imperfect markets with institutional constraints a married couple s version of the model is estimated on italian microdata the empirical results show that male labour supply is rather inelastic while labour supply among females especially participation is considerably more elastic the elasticities depend strongly on household income the largest elasticities are found for females living in poor households the results of the tax simulations suggest that there are only modest labour supply responses from replacing the 1987 system by proportional taxes copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

the estimation of a joint wage hours labor supply model in this paper the standard cross sectional static model of labor supply is modified to make the wage endogenous and a joint wage hours model is estimated the econometric technique addresses the non linearity of the budget constraint by approximating the constraint by a series of discrete points the results show that the budget constraint is indeed nonlinear that hours affect the wage quadratically that true wage elasticities are lower as a result and that the model fits the hours distribution much better than the standard tobit model

the rise and fall of the dollar a comment if readers of this paper were to ask themselves what the rates for the world s major currencies are likely to be in say three years time it is doubtful whether they would have much confidence in their predictions even conditional forecasts on the basis of particular assumptions about policy would be hard to make this state of ignorance and our admission of it owes much to the recent behaviour of the dollar which as koromzay llewellyn and potter so usefully discuss largely defies explanation in terms of conventional economic analysis even when full use is made of the luxury of hindsight that ignorance itself may however have important policy implications these comments relate to both the theoretical and policy aspects of the paper though the focus as in the paper itself is on the implications for policy a general difficulty may be stated at the outset the paper reasonably enough concentrates on the dollar in the i98os but though this is much the most dramatic illustration of the difficulties in explaining exchange rate movements it is not the only one thus ideally an explanation of dollar strength should be consistent with explanations given for previous dollar weakness see for example bliss i986 and for other recent major movements of exchange rates such as the apparently similar gravity defying rise in sterling in the late i970s and early 198os where theory and empirical analysis fail explanations tend to become ad hoc with a danger that false or over strong policy conclusions are drawn even a casual comparison with the united kingdom raises some questions as well as supporting the general thrust of this paper thus the monetary fiscal mix in the united kingdom was very different from that in the united states according to oecd figures the structural budget moved to surplus by some 6 of gdp between i979 and i982 which must at least suggest a cautious approach to some of the simpler stories that trace the rise in the dollar to united states fiscal irresponsibility the united states experience which as the paper demonstrates does not accord with conventional models of the overshootingtype also throws doubt in the other direction about applications of that kind of model to the united kingdom for example by buiter and miller i98i of course the united kingdom s situation was special because of north sea oil but if north sea oil was important the obvious reason would be due to its effect on relative current account positions which does not seem to work well for the united states and in any case most estimates suggest that oil should account for only a part of the rise in sterling see powell and horton i985 for a survey and as in the united states empirical models were notably unsuccessful in predicting the exchange rate haache and townend i98i

on the determination of occupational attainment and mobility the underlying motivation for much of the research into the determinants of occupational attainment is to enable inferences to be made as to the relative position of various groups at a point in time or an individual s economic mobility over time in this paper we compare unordered and ordered discrete choice approaches to estimating models of occupational attainment estimates from these methods differ substantially indicating that the determination of which technique is more appropriate is an important issue the ordered method appears to be more consistent with the motivation of previous research and requires less computer time unordered models however are better able to predict occupational distribution

firm size wage differentials in the netherlands an unsolved problem in modern labor economics is the positive relation between the size of the firm in which a worker is employed and his wage one line of research that has been developed quite recently in this field is the application of endogenous switching regression models in this paper we utilize such a model to investigate firm size wage differentials in the netherlands the principal findings are that larger firms pay higher returns on schooling whereas smaller firms tend to reward iq combined with the finding that high iq workers are sorted into the largest firms the results are consistent with a model of job screening furthermore we find that employed sons of self employed fathers are more likely to work in small firms and that wage prospects for all types of workers are indeed most favorable in larger firms

what s different about banks abstract negotiable certificates of deposit cd s trade in the capital market in competition with other securities like commercial paper and bankers acceptances if cd s must pay lenders competitive monetary interest the reserve tax on cd s is borne by bank borrowers viability of the tax means there must be something special about bank loans that makes some borrowers willing to pay higher interest rates than those on other securities of equivalent risk moreover there must be something special about banks that prevents other intermediaries from competing to assure that it never pays to finance loans with cd s

unemployment and female labour supply the definition of labour force participation in the standard labour supply model stands in sharp contrast to that used in compiling the labour force statistics in the labour supply models only those supplying positive hours of work are considered to be labour force participants on the other hand participation in the labour force statistics is often defined to include not only those supplying positive hours but also those actively searching for work this paper is an attempt to reconcile these concepts by allowing unemployed workers to enter a generalisation of the standard labour supply model this turns out to be a convenient way to enter demand side factors directly into the determination of an individual s labour market position the model is applied with some success to the working behaviour of married women in the uk family expenditure survey

bond covenants and delegated monitoring this paper examines alternative contracting arrangements available to a firm seeking to finance an investment project the authors consider the choice between loan contracts with covenants based on noisy indicators of the firm s financial health and loan contracts enforced by a monitoring specialist in one interpretation the specialist is a financial intermediary the firm s choice is shown to depend upon the firm s credit rating the accuracy of financial indicators of the firm s condition the loss from premature liquidation of the firm s project and the cost of monitoring

finite sample bias in iv estimation of intertemporal labor supply models is the intertemporal substitution elasticity really small the empirical literature on intertemporal labor supply behavior documents that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of labor supply is very low with a plausible range of zero to 0 2 drawing upon the literature on the distribution of instrumental variables iv estimators this paper demonstrates that this conventional wisdom is erroneous because it does not take into account the severe finite sample bias in these estimates that arise from weak instruments this paper adopts several approaches to adjust for the problems induced by these weak instruments the empirical results show that when uncorrected for finite sample bias the two stage least squares 2sls estimate of the elasticity is essentially zero as in most of the previous studies with its valid confidence interval being open ended however when corrected for finite sample bias the estimate becomes approximately 0 5 with a much tighter confidence interval

the eurobond market and corporate financial policy abstract on average significant positive abnormal returns are associated with eurobond issues during the period 1975 1985 the cross sectional and time series distributions of the abnormal returns are consistent with the hypothesis that impediments to the adjustment of asset supplies to new demand conditions are large enough to create profitable financing opportunities for firms our analysis demonstrates how profitable financing opportunities can persist on the eurobond market and when they are most likely to arise

job complexity and wages the authors estimate a model inspired by j tinbergen s 1956 article with utility maximizing job choice where utility depends on job complexity and the wage rate and where the equilibrium wage structure provides for compensation for more complex jobs it involves maximum likelihood estimation of a two equation model with heteroscedastic errors in which one of the equations is an ordered probit in the wage function individual characteristics and job level interact comparative advantage females face a steeper wage slope across job levels individuals marginal rate of substitution between wage and job complexity is increasing both in job complexity and wages copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a survey of the international evidence and lessons learned about unconventional monetary policies is a new normal in our future this study examines the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policies ump it considers whether these policies have been successful and where their effects remain uncertain we survey both the domestic financial market and macro economic effects of ump in the economies where these policies were introduced and their international spillover effects the paper considers the impact of a wide range of ump rather than the effects of specific policy instruments we also provide a retrospective on the important case of japan beginning in the late1990s and ask whether the eurozone s experience with ump is substantively different given its structure of policymaking finally we ask if the old normal is not in our future should the new normal in monetary policy routinely include what we now refer to as ump we conclude that ump can prevent economic collapse but are not designed to promote stronger long term economic growth apart from new communication strategies the use of ump under normal circumstances does not appear to be a sound monetary policy strategy failure to learn this lesson might also enable future policy makers to ask or expect too much from their central banks

worldwide economic recoveries from financial crises through the decades abstract the profiles of economic recoveries after a financial crisis are identified through a self organizing map covering 104 countries during 1973 2017 first and surprisingly only 55 of the 276 events belong to the usual v u l classification new s shaped bounce back recoveries d oomed ones and double dip m occur in 23 18 and 4 of the cases respectively second the frequencies of profiles vary with the crisis type countries development and location and over time third unlike government spending supporting domestic credit liquidity foreign trade or else the exchange rate after the crisis may help activity bounce back

new evidence on the valuation effects of convertible bond calls this study examines the wealth effects of convertible bond call announcements on stock holders straight bondholders and called and non called convertible debtholders we docu ment that forced conversions are associated with a significant loss in firm value the results suggest that convertible call announcements can trigger both negative signal and wealth transfer effects we show that at least part ofthe negative effect on stock prices results from wealth transfer to straight bondholders our analysis also lends empirical validity to the common contention that called convertible bondholders suffer wealth expropriation due to the elimination ofthe premium the wealth effect on non called convertible debtholders is insignificant cross sectional analysis reveals that the negative signal effect is important in explaining bond stock and firm excess returns finally we present evidence that refutes the notion that bonds are called to relieve the firm from restrictive debt covenants

theoretical and practical arguments for modeling labor supply as a choice among latent jobs models of labor supply derived from stochastic utility representations and discretized sets of feasible hours of work have gained popularity because they are more practical than standard approaches based on marginal calculus in this paper we argue that practicality is not the only feature that can be addressed by means of stochastic choice theory this theory also offers a powerful framework for developing a more realistic model for labor supply choices founded on individuals having preferences over jobs and facing restrictions on the choice of jobs and hours of work we discuss and clarify how this modeling framework deviates from both the conventional discrete approach van soest 1995 as well as the standard textbook approach based on marginal calculus hausman 1985 we furthermore discuss how the model based on job choice offers the possibility of conducting a richer set of simulations of alternative policies

foreign direct investment and debt financing in emerging economies the rich dynamics of capital flows is an important characteristic of business cycles in emerging market economies in the data external debt is always procyclical while fdi is procyclical only in normal times we provide a microfounded rationale for this pattern by linking financial shocks to capital flows for this purpose we build a small open economy model in which firms are subject to borrowing constraints and are either owned domestically or by foreign investors who purchase firms through fdi during a financial crisis the valuation gap per unit net worth between foreign and domestic investors widens which triggers more fdi inflow our model produces business cycle moments consistent with empirical observations

competition risk neutrality and loan commitments abstract we rationalize fixed rate loan commitments forward credit contracting with options in a competitive credit market with universal risk neutrality future interest rates are random but there are no transactions costs borrowers finance projects with bank loans and choose ex post unobservable actions that affect project payoffs credit contract design by the bank is the outcome of a non cooperative nash game between the bank and the borrower the initial formal analysis is basically in two steps first we show that the only spot credit market nash equilibria that exist are inefficient in the sense that they result in welfare losses for borrowers due to the bank s informational handicap second we show that loan commitments because of their ability to weaken the link between the offering bank s expected profit and the loan interest rate enable the complete elimination of informationally induced welfare losses and thus produce an outcome that strictly pareto dominates any spot market equilibrium perhaps our most surprising result is that if the borrower has some initial liquidity it is better for the borrower to use it now to pay a commitment fee and buy a loan commitment that entitles it to borrow in the future rather than save it for use as inside equity in conjunction with spot borrowing

an empirical analysis of the determinants of corporate debt ownership structure i examine the relation between corporate debt ownership structure and several firm characteristics suggested by recent theory the results demonstrate the importance of monitoring and information costs the likelihood and costs of inefficient liquidation and borrowers incentives in affecting firms debt source preferences several theoretical predictions receive support while others do not the results also suggest important differences between bank and private non bank debt which contrasts with most theoretical models additionally i find evidence of systematic use of bank debt by firms with access to public debt suggesting the benefits attributed to bank debt in theoretical models remain important after firms gain access to public debt markets although different lenders appear to have different maturity preferences the results also suggest debt maturity and debt ownership decisions may be separable

earnings functions testing for the demand side abstract to analyze labor market phenomena one may simultaneously grade workers by education and jobs by level of difficulty and complexity human capital theory predicts earnings based on only worker quality thurow s version of a segmented labor market theory predicts that only the job level is relevant and the assignment theory predicts that both variables are relevant using three different data sets for the netherlands testing demonstrates convincingly the superiority of the assignment theory

the determinants of the maturity of corporate debt issues we document the determinants of the term to maturity of 7 369 bonds and notes issued between 1982 and 1993 our main finding is that large firms with investment grade credit ratings typically borrow at the short end and at the long end and of the maturity spectrum while firms with speculative grade credit ratings typically borrow in the middle of the maturity spectrum this pattern is consistent with the theory that risky firms do not issue short term debt in order to avoid inefficient liquidation but are screened out of the long term debt market because of the prospect of risky asset substitution traditionally capital structure research has focused on how much of a firm s future cash flows should be paid out to debtholders instead of equityholders an equally important issue is when future cash flows should be paid out to debtholders a firm that finances its projects with short term debt risks serious financial difficulty if the debt cannot be extended similarly a firm that finances its activities with long term debt can sacrifice profits by needlessly risking mismanagement of resources after cash flows are returned from investments but before they are due to debtholders this study investigates the factors that firms consider when choosing the maturity of their liabilities we document the determinants of the maturity of 7 368 public debt issues made by u s corporations between 1982 and 1993 our empirical tests are based on existing theoretical models that relate the maturity of a firm s borrowings to the riskiness of its cash flows the time until investments pay off the quality of information held by outsiders the expected

search and the efficient assignment of workers to jobs in a model in which different types of workers form matches with different types of employers a method of calculating opportunity costs of workers and jobs is derived these are shown to differ systematically from the reservation wages and profits used by workers and employers to determine whether matches should be formed ex ante differences among workers and among jobs then generate externalities in the labor market resulting in inefficient assignments of workers to jobs and multiple equilibria intervention in the labor market by altering the assignment can increase aggregate output but may cause regressive redistribution copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

structural models of family labor supply a discrete choice approach a static neoclassical structural model is presented explaining labor supply of both spouses in two adult households in the netherlands family preferences are described with a direct translog utility function with the husbands leisure the wifes leisure and family income as its arguments we assume that the choice set of each family is finite account is taken of the dutch tax and benefits system we allow for hours restrictions and random preferences and account for unobserved wages of nonworkers the models are estimated using smooth simulated maximum likelihood results based upon dutch cross section data from 1987 are illustrated by confidence intervals for elasticities and by several policy simulations excerpt

do fixers perform worse than non fixers during global recessions and recoveries there is an important debate about how economies with different exchange rate regimes performed during the great recession and its ensuing recovery while economic theory suggests that economies with fixed exchange rates are more affected and recover more slowly from global shocks than economies with non fixed exchange rates the empirical evidence on the most recent global recession has been mixed this paper examines the exchange rate and economic growth nexus and assesses how this relationship is affected by the four global recessions and recoveries the world economy has experienced post bretton woods while there is no robust long term relationship between exchange rate regimes and growth there is evidence that fixers recover from global recessions at a weaker pace than non fixers

the effect of part time work on wages evidence from the social security rules this article identifies the part time wage effect using hours variation caused by the social security rules we show that work hours and wages drop sharply at ages 62 and 65 we argue that the hours decline causes the wage decline resulting in a 25 wage penalty for men who cut their work week from 40 to 20 hours however we find little evidence for such an effect among women we also show that models that fail to account for the joint determination of hours and wages will understate the labor supply response to a tax change by about 26

is there a pecking order evidence from a panel of ipo firms abstract we test the pecking order model of capital structure by examining the financing of firms that went public in 1983 we estimate a logit to predict external financing and a multinomial logit to predict the type of financing using data on the ipo firms security offerings during 1984 1992 our results indicate that the probability of obtaining external funds is unrelated to the shortfall in internally generated funds although firms with cash surpluses avoid external financing firms that access the capital markets do not follow the pecking order when choosing the type of security to offer

choice among wage hours packages an empirical investigation of male labor supply this article specifies and estimates an empirical model of male labor supply based on an implicit market model of wage hours determination we discuss how moving from a standard labor supply model to an implicit market model affects model specification and choice of estimation technique we find that average hourly earnings are not independent of hours worked and that ols estimates of the wage hours relationship are biased we also show that a labor supply model that assumes wages to be independent of hours worked produces a positively biased estimate of the effect of the wage on labor supply

reserve requirements and capital flows in latin america abstract the experience of a number of central banks in emerging economies indicates that capital flows can pose a dilemma for example raising policy rates can attract more capital inflows by raising deposit rates it has been suggested however that raising reserve requirements instead of the policy rate can address this dilemma as deposit rates will not necessarily increase even if lending rates rise to investigate this possibility this paper examines how banks adjust loan and deposit rates in response to changes in reserve requirements we use data on 97 banks from five latin american countries over the period 2000 14 our results indicate that higher reserve requirements are associated with lower deposit rates whereas loan rates remain unchanged during normal times and increase during periods of large capital inflows reserve requirements may therefore be a way to mitigate the dilemma posed by capital inflows in some latin american economies

labor supply as a choice among latent jobs unobserved heterogeneity and identification this paper discusses aspects of a framework for modeling labor supply where the notion of job choice is fundamental in this framework workers are assumed to have preferences over latent job opportunities belonging to worker specific choice sets from which they choose their preferred job the observed hours of work and wage is interpreted as the job specific hours and wage of the chosen job the main contribution of this paper is an analysis of the identification problem of this framework under various conditions when conventional cross section micro data are applied

are college chief executives paid like corporate ceos or bureaucrats we study compensation of college chief executives from 1997 to 2004 although presidential salaries have acquired the attention of the media congress and the internal revenue service irs in recent years they are much below those of corporate ceos compared with ceos in corporations with comparable sizes college chief executives earn on average approximately one third of the compensation of their corporate counterparts however ceo compensation is more volatile than that of college chief executives our results show that private college presidential salaries are consistent with the prediction of job complexity and institutional reputation hypotheses presidential compensations of public research universities on the other hand are more consistent with the prediction of job complexity hypothesis only hence our findings do not support the prediction of bureaucrat hypothesis for both private and public institutions

brics how important is the exchange rate pass through this paper analyses the exchange rate pass through erpt into domestic consumer prices in brics brazil russia india china and south africa countries from mid 1990s onwards by using three different econometric approaches i e the single equation approach the var approach and the time varying parameter approach it is also studied the role of macroeconomic determinants in erpt our results suggest that a erpt is higher for the emerging markets with mostly floating exchange rates brazil russia and south africa than for the other brics countries b exchange rate explains on average around the 40 of the price variance for brazil russia and south africa and c inflation volatility exchange rate volatility and openness seem to be the key macroeconomic determinants in brics countries

borrowing relationships intermediation and the cost of issuing public securities abstract this paper investigates how an established borrowing relationship affects the costs associated with initial public offerings of equity our model illustrates how the existence of a borrowing relationship reduces the ex ante uncertainty about the value of the issuing firm s equity in the secondary market if underpricing is related to uncertainty a borrowing relationship can reduce underpricing empirically we find that other things equal ipos of firms with previously established borrowing relationships are underpriced substantially less than other ipos

why is the euro punching below its weight on the twentieth anniversary of its inception the euro has yet to expand its role as an international currency we document this fact with a wide range of indicators including its role as an anchor or reference in exchange rate arrangements which we argue is a portmanteau measure and as a currency for the denomination of trade and assets on all these dimensions the euro comprises a far smaller share than that of the us dollar furthermore that share has been roughly constant since 1999 by some measures the euro plays no larger a role than the deutschemark and french franc that it replaced we explore the reasons for this underperformance while the leading anchor currency may have a natural monopoly a number of additional factors have limited the euro s reach including lack of financial center limited geopolitical reach and us and chinese dominance in technology research most important in our view is the comparatively scarce supply of safe euro denominated assets which we document the european central bank lack of policy clarity may have also played a role we show that the euro era can be divided into a bundesbank plus period and a whatever it takes period the first shows a smooth transition from the european exchange rate mechanism and continued to stabilize german inflation the second period is characterised by an expanding ecb arsenal of credit facilities to european banks and sovereigns

impacts of rmb devaluation on china s trade balances a time varying svar approach in this article i empirically examine time varying effects of real renminbi rmb devaluation on china s trade balances to this end i estimate a time varying structural vector autoregression mod

nurses wanted is the job too harsh or is the wage too low when entering the job market nurses choose among different kind of jobs each of these jobs is characterized by wage sector primary care or hospital and shift daytime work or shift this paper estimates a multi sector job type random utility model of labor supply on data for norwegian registered nurses rns in 2000 the empirical model implies that labor supply is rather inelastic 10 increase in the wage rates for all nurses is estimated to yield 3 3 increase in overall labor supply this modest response shadows for much stronger inter job type responses our approach differs from previous studies in two ways first to our knowledge it is the first time that a model of labor supply for nurses is estimated taking explicitly into account the choices that rn s have regarding work place and type of job second it differs from previous studies with respect to the measurement of the compensations for different types of work so far it has been focused on wage differentials but there are more attributes of a job than the wage based on the estimated random utility model we therefore calculate the expected value of compensation that makes a utility maximizing agent indifferent between types of jobs here between shift work and daytime work it turns out that norwegian nurses working shifts may be willing to work shift relative to daytime work for a lower wage than the current one

some evidence on the uniqueness of initial public debt offerings debt initial public offerings ipos represent a major shift in a firm s financing policy by both extending debt maturity and altering the public private debt mix in contrast to findings for seasoned debt offerings we document a significantly negative stock price response to debt ipo announcements this result is consistent with debt maturity and debt ownership structure theories the equity wealth effect is negatively related to the offer s maturity and positively related to the degree of bank monitoring we find that firms with less information asymmetry and firms with higher growth opportunities experience a less adverse stock price response the decision to access the public debt market for the first time represents a major change in a firm s financing policy an initial public debt offer alters the firm s debt structure in two significant ways not only does this policy choice affect the firm s debt ownership structure by altering its mix of public relative to private debt but it also extends the average debt maturity of the firm substantially this study provides empirical evidence on the validity of some important debt structure theories by focusing on the information content of initial public debt offers debt ipos two major strands of theories have evolved in the literature the debt ownership choice theories model corporate choice of private and public debt mix see e g fama 1985 diamond 1991a and rajan 1992 while the other set of theories models corporate debt maturity choice easterbrook 1984 flannery 1986 and kale and noe 1990 a number of recent studies empirically test some of the predictions of these models barclay and smith 1995 guedes and opler 1996 houston and james 1996 johnson 1997 and stohs and mauer 1996

the maturity structure of corporate debt we provide an empirical examination of the determinants of corporate debt maturity our evidence offers strong support for the contracting cost hypothesis firms that have few growth options are large or are regulated have more long term debt in their capital structure we find little evidence that firms use the maturity structure of their debt to signal information to the market the evidence is consistent however with the hypothesis that firms with larger information asymmetries issue more short term debt we find no evidence that taxes affect debt maturity

sectoral labour supply choice restrictions and functional form this is the authors submitted article version which is the pre peer reviewed version of the article the article changed title in the peer reviewing process from analyzing labor supply behavior with latent job opportunity sets and institutional choice constraints later published as discussion paper no 399 http brage bibsys no ssb handle urn nbn no bibsys brage 21006

estimation of a labour supply model with censoring due to unemployment and underemployment this study proposes and implements a method of labour supply estimation which is appropriate when the sample contains unemployed and underemployed workers the estimation method consists of excluding unemployed and underemployed workers from the sample and then using to avoid selection bias an extension of heckman s approach to the case where two correlated selection rules generate the sample hausman s specification test is then used to determine whether ignoring constrained workers has led to biases in traditional labour supply estimates and the empirical results suggest that previous estimates of several important parameters are biased since the biases go in the direction that would be predicted by the hypothesis that the unemployed and underemployed are constrained the results support this hypothesis