The Evolution of the Demand for Temporary Help Supply Employment in the United States

The level of temporary help supply (THS) employment surged during the late 1980s and the 1990s. However, we know little about where these workers were placed and, thus, there is a gap in our understanding of cyclical and trend industry employment in the U.S.. To close this gap, we estimate the proportion of THS employees in each major U.S. industry during 1977-97 using information from input-output tables and from the Contingent Worker Supplements to the CPS surveys of February 1995 and February 1997. Our estimates indicate that almost all of the growth in THS employment is attributed to a change in the hiring behavior of firms, rather than to a disproportional increase in the size of more THS-intensive industries. In fact, the proportion of THS employees in each major American industry, except the public sector, increased during our sample period. These increases were particularly large in services and in manufacturing where by 1997 close to 4 percent of all employees were THS workers..

Extraneous Events and Underreaction to Earnings News

Psychological evidence indicates that it is hard to process multiple stimuli and perform multiple tasks at the same time. This paper tests the investor distraction hypothesis, which holds that the arrival of extraneous news causes trading and market prices to react sluggishly to relevant news about a firm. Our test focuses on the competition for investor attention between a firm’s earnings announcements and the earnings announcements of other firms. We find that the immediate stock price and volume reaction to a firm’s earnings surprise is weaker, and post-earnings announcement drift is stronger, when a greater number of earnings announcements by other firms are made on the same day. Distracting news has a stronger effect on firms that receive positive than negative earnings surprises. Industry-unrelated news has a stronger distracting effect than related news. A trading strategy that exploits post-earnings announcement drift is unprofitabl

Government Policy and the Dynamics of Market Structure: Evidence from Critical Access Hospitals,” Working paper,

Abstract This paper seeks to understand the impact of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility Program. The goal of this program is to maintain access to hospital care for rural residents. Like many other government policies, the CAH program targets the underlying supply infrastructure, in this case by providing more generous cost-plus reimbursement to rural hospitals in exchange for capacity and service limitations. The program created a new class of hospital, the Critical Access Hospital (CAH), to which rural hospitals can convert. We specify a dynamic oligopoly model of the rural hospital industry with hospital investment in capacity, exit and conversion to CAH status. We develop new methods that allow us to efficiently estimate the structural parameters and compute counterfactual equilibria. We use the methods to estimate the impact of eliminating and modifying the CAH program on access to hospitals and patient welfare. We find that ???. Our methods may be more broadly useful in estimating and computing other dynamic oligopoly games with investment in capacity

Product Differentiation and the Use of Information Technology: New Evidence from the Trucking Industry," mimeo

Institute’s third annual conference at Atlantic City for many helpful comments. Research assistance wa