More than 100 savings and loans are currently involved in supervisory goodwill litigation against the federal government, with total claims approach fifty billion dollars. These claims arise from a provision in the 1989 Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) that phased out the use of supervisory goodwill to satisfy bank capital requirements. California-based savings and loans such as Glendale Federal and California Federal sought damage awards of two billion dollars each. This paper uses a standard event-study analysis framework to estimate the abnormal returns to litigation interests issued by California Federal. Unlike equity shares in publicly-traded firms, the value of these litigation interests is determined solely by the damage award in the California Federal supervisory goodwill litigation. California Federal's secondary litigation interests, which represent residual claims on the damage award, exhibit statistically significant abnormal returns in response to seven announcements affecting the expected final damage award in the litigation.

This paper explores the effect product differentiation has on the ability of firms to collude in setting prices. It is often thought that product differentiation can be an impediment to collusion. However, the results in this paper suggest that product differentiation can enhance the ability of firms to collude. Specifically, in an infinitely repeated Hotelling duopoly, trigger strategies which result in the collusive outcome are subgame perfect equilibria for a larger range of discount factors the more differentiated the products are.

Do temporary nursing agencies cause labor supply to nursing to be greater or less than it otherwise would be? Using cross-section survey data from 1984, 1988, and 1992, this question is examined within a nine-equation system capable of estimating hours that would be supplied in the absence of the agency option. Results indicate that 6% to 8% more labor would be supplied by nurses who work exclusively for agencies if that option no longer existed. This is essentially because it is more likely that these nurses will decide to work full-time rather than work part-time or not at all.

The decision whether or not to work for a temporary agency was examined using a 1990 cross-section survey of Illinois registered nurses and a model which corrects for the simultaneity between agency choice and wages (and benefits). Conditional on having decided to work, preschool children, age, and being female have significant positive effects on the decision to work for an agency, while spousal income, experience, and being white have significant negative effects. School-age children have no effect. Nurses who work for agencies value wages more in relation to benefits than nurses who work for more traditional employers.

Past studies on discrimination in home mortgage lending have focused on the loan approval process, yet results show that most of the variation in minority lending across banks is due to the variation in the volume of minority applications and not the variation in the minority approval rate. This paper focuses instead on the application stage and the impact of branch locations on minority applications and lending. The presence of branches in minority areas significantly increases a bank's volume of minority applications and hence its minority lending; however, branch locations do not appear to affect the minority approval rate. These finding refute the argument that banks take in deposits but do not lend in minority areas, and the view that technological innovations such as telephone banking have made branches obsolete. They suggest that the current policy of emphasizing branches in minority areas may be effective in increasing minority lending at individual banks, but not necessarily the overall lending in a minority area.

Growing links between international governmental organizations and NGO/GROs in developing countries pose a moral dilemma as the promotion of effective development may conflict with respect for state sovereignty. This paper examines this dilemma and develops principles to balance the two considerations.

To achieve humanitarian objectives, international development assistance must be structured to insure its effectiveness. The resulting conditionality, however, raises sovereignty concerns as attempts to promote effectiveness may conflict with respect for recipient state sovereignty and indirectly violate individuals' right to self-determination. The paper explores the nature of this conflict and provides guidelines for official donors.

This paper analyzes the magnitude of earnings differentials and differences in the rates of return to education for individuals who attended private and public high schools in the U.S. from 1976 to 1983, controlling for self-selection into school sector, as well as observed differences in family background, ability, and characteristics of the high school attended. I develop a model of school choice, educational attainment and earnings determination that allows both the returns to observable characteristics and potential selection biases to vary across private and public school attendees. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and dat on private high school affiliations and tuition and fees at the county level, I estimate an endogenous switching regressions model of school choice and wage determination in which years of schooling is endogenous. I find that private school students enjoy significantly higher rates of return to education at all levels.