Organizations & Markets

An extended series of economic studies has failed to find any statistically significant impact on national injury rates due to the OSHA. Two distinct explanations for this apparent failure of OSHA have been put forward in these studies. For the purposes of this study, the first of these explanations will be called the "noncompliance hypothesis" and the second will be labeled the "inefficiency hypothesis." The first of these hypotheses leads immediately to two dilemmas, which can only be resolved by expanding the range of issues considered in an analysis of OSHA.

The presence of traders with superior information leads to a positive bid-ask spread even when the specialist is risk-neutral and makes zero expected profits. The resulting transaction prices convey information, and the expectation of the average spread squared times volume is bounded by a number that is independent of insider activity. The serial correlation of transaction price differences is a function of the proportion of the spread due to adverse selection. A bid-ask spread implies a divergence between observed returns and realizable returns.

In this paper, insider trading is viewed as a signal of managements' assessments of firms' future prospects and its information content is compared to that in managements' earnings forecasts. These forecasts are explicit statements of managements' assessments of future prospects. A number of measures of insider trading designed to capture the information aspect of trading are investigated.

This paper presents a macroeconomic model containing optimizing, inventory-holding firms that is consistent with a number of prominent empirical regularities concerning fluctuations in output, exchange rates, relative prices, and money. Prices are sticky, but they are not predetermined. Still, our model is consistent with exchange rate overshooting in the sense of Dornbusch. Typical sticky-price models allow a divergence between current production and current demand, but this divergence is never allowed to feed back into the model.

This paper adds to recent evidence on market inefficiency in processing information in earnings reports. It documents that short positions taken in sample stocks which did not report earnings by the date expected during the sample period, 1971–1976, would have been abnormally profitable, before transaction costs. This is because late reports, on average, revealed bad news which was not anticipated in market prices prior to the report date.

How many patrol cars staffed with a single police officer are needed to provide equivalent police service to an existing system with n two-officer patrol cars? This question is explored for New York City using a multiple patrol car per call priority queueing model. It is shown that a one-officer patrol program is feasible, yet pitfalls exist which could adversely affect its performance. The paper details the process of data analysis and model building and emphasizes the subjective elements that remain in a highly technical OR study.

One of the primary concerns of urban police departments is the effective use of patrol cars. In large cities, police assigned to patrol cars typically account for more than 50% of total police manpower and their allocation has become particularly crucial in light of recent fiscal cutbacks.