Although the media is often modeled as a faceless institution, its main output news content is generated by specific people. This is important because unlike, say, making tires or processing paper, writing is a fiercely individualistic craft that allows the author’s style, persuasion, views, or bias to be injected into the finished product. In this paper, we present direct evidence that the writing of specific journalists has a casual effect on aggregate market outcomes.
School district consolidation represents one of the most dramatic changes in education governance and management in the United States in the twentieth century. Over 100,000 school districts have been eliminated through consolidation since 1938, a drop of almost 90 percent (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003, Table 87). This trend continues throughout the country, largely because consolidation is widely regarded as a way for school districts to cut costs.
This paper provides a new look at the potential cost consequences of consolidation. Using a unique panel data set for rural school districts in New York State, we ask whether consolidation leads to significant cost savings, controlling for student performance. This paper therefore complements recent research on the causes of consolidation (Brasington, 1999, 2003).
This paper embeds optimal contracting between the agent (manager) and shareholders into the cash flow framework commonly used in the literature of structural models of capital structure (Leland, 1994). By connecting these two literatures, I provide a general framework to study the impact of agency characteristics on firm valuation and capital structure. Moreover, the dynamic nature of this framework allows me to calibrate my model and, in turn, quantitatively assess the agency impact on the firm’s leverage decision.
