We use a cobweb model to construct a labor market model that can be used to analyze the impacts of changing labor market conditions on the market for new accounting graduates. These conditions are partitioned into macroeconomic and academic-specific changes. We find that 73.2 percent of the decline in the number of accounting baccalaureate degrees since 1990 can be explained by such factors as the decline in the relative salaries of entry-level accountants, the decline in academic preparedness of incoming freshmen, implementation of the 150-hour requirement, and increases in freshmen enrollments. Furthermore, we explain 60.1 percent of the observed increase in master's level accounting degrees. This increase can be attributed to a rise in the salary premium associated with earning a master ‘s degree and implementation of the 150-hour requirement.

Environmental activities of a company may result in payments for hazardous waste site costs. Based upon current financial accounting standards, prospective payments for these costs are not always reported as liabilities on financial statements. Agribusiness lenders require complete information on the environmental status of agribusiness borrowers in order to assess the potential effects of environmental liability. In addition, agribusiness lenders have been held responsible by the judicial system for the environmental problems of their borrowers. Publicly available, financial and environmental data was used to develop models to quantify the effects of environmental status regardless of whether environmental liabilities are included in the financial statements. The results indicate that environmental status is dependent upon source of environmental hazard and company size, adjusted for industry affiliation. Affiliation with particular 4-digit SIC codes reduces the probability of the borrower being considered a significant environmental liability risk. [EconLit Citations: Q13, K32, G20]. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

We examine the effect of different contexts in an educational

This study applies a model of systematic belief revision to examine the effect of the relation between current-period unexpected earnings and prior-period security returns on the currentperiod relation between those unexpected earnings and returns. Cross-sectional analysis blurs the effects of past information on current returns in a manner that makes it easy to overlook any dependence on historical patterns in this information. We show that the market responds to earnings innovations conditional on these patterns but does not respond in the manner predicted by the Hogarth and Einhorn (1992) belief adjustment model. Nonetheless, the results suggest that individual decision processes are detectable in capital markets data.