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High Tobin’s q industries receive more funding from capital markets than low Tobin’s q industries from 1971 to 1996. Since then, the opposite is true. The key to understanding this shift is that large firms, for which q is more a proxy for rents than investment opportunities, have become more important within industries. For these firms, repurchases but not capital expenditures increase in the cross-section with q, so that q explains the variation of repurchases more than of capital expenditures. Consequently, equity capital flows out of high q industries because for these industries stock repurchases are high and issuances are low.

It is widely documented that places with higher levels of income inequality have lower rates of social mobility. But it is an open question whether and how higher levels of inequality actually lead to lower rates of mobility. We propose that one channel through which higher rates of income inequality might lead to lower rates of upward mobility is lower rates of human capital investment among low-income individuals. Specifically, we posit that greater levels of income inequality could lead low-income youth to perceive a lower rate of return on investment in their own human capital. Such an effect would offset any potential \"aspirational\" effect coming from higher educational wage premiums. The data are consistent with this prediction: Individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to drop out of school if they live in a place with a greater gap between the bottom and middle of the income distribution. This finding is robust in relation to a number of specification checks and tests for confounding factors. This analysis offers an explanation for how income inequality might lead to a perpetuation of economic disadvantage, and it has implications for the types of interventions and programs that would effectively promote upward mobility among youth of low socioeconomic status.

The UK has enacted a number of reforms to the structure of disability benefits that has made it a major case study for other countries thinking of reform. The introduction of Incapacity Benefit in 1995 coincided with a strong decline in disability benefit expenditure, reversing previous sharp increases. From 2008 the replacement of Incapacity Benefit with Employment and Support Allowance was intended to reduce spending further. We bring together administrative and survey data over the period and highlight key differences in receipt of disability benefits by age, sex, and health. These disability benefit reforms and the trends in receipt are also put into the context of broader trends in health and employment by education and sex. We document a growing proportion of claimants in any age group with mental and behavioral disorders as their principal health condition. We also show the decline in the number of older working age men receiving disability benefits to have been partially offset by growth in the number of younger women receiving these benefits. We speculate on the impact of disability reforms on employment.

This paper augments the existing literature by testing the moderation effect financial development plays in the energy-carbon dioxide emissions nexus for Ghana using data for the 1971-2014 period. The relationship is analyzed using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) regression techniques. The empirical results show that in the long run, income, energy consumption, and financial development lead to increases in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the manufacturing and construction sectors while urbanization reduces CO2 emissions. However, financial development recorded a negative moderation effect on the CO2 emissions effect of energy consumption. A further investigation from Toda-Yamamoto causality and variance decomposition analysis were conducted. The implications from the findings suggest the financial sector has the potential to address the problem of CO2 emissions. This requires authorities to put measures in place to make financial institutions more circumspect and prudent in giving credit. Moreover, this study argues that it is time financial institutions in Ghana support research into the development of energy efficiency as well as renewable energy technologies.