Knowledge that Transforms

In this paper a combined capital asset pricing model and option pricing model is considered and then applied to the derivation of equity's value and its systematic risk. In the first section we develop the two models and present some newly found properties of the option pricing model. The second section is concerned with the effects of these properties on the securityholders of firms with less than perfect ‘me first’ rules. We show how unanticipated changes in firm capital and asset structures can differentially affect the firm's debt and equity. In the final section of the paper we consider a number of theoretical and empirical implications of the joint model. These include investment policy as well as the causes and effects of non-stationarity in the systematic risk of levered equity and risky debt.

The validity of the classic Black-Scholes option pricing formula depends on the capability of investors to follow a dynamic portfolio strategy in the stock that replicates the payoff structure to the option. The critical assumption required for such a strategy to be feasible, is that the underlying stock return dynamics can be described by a stochastic process with a continuous sample path. In this paper, an option pricing formula is derived for the more-general case when the underlying stock returns are generated by a mixture of both continuous and jump processes. The derived formula has most of the attractive features of the original Black-Scholes formula in that it does not depend on investor preferences or knowledge of the expected return on the underlying stock. Moreover, the same analysis applied to the options can be extended to the pricing of corporate liabilities.

Robert H. Ashton, Cognitive Changes Induced by Accounting Changes: Experimental Evidence on the Functional Fixation Hypothesis, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 14, Studies on Human Information Processing in Accounting (1976), pp. 1-17

Ian R. C. Eggleton, [Discussion of Patterns, Prototypes, and Predictions: An Exploratory Study]: A Reply, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 14, Studies on Human Information Processing in Accounting (1976), pp. 145-158

Budgeting, Supervisor, Supervisory style, Performance

Accounting changes, Decision makers, Investor behavior

Disclosures, Financial reporting, Internationals study, Disclosure quantity

Increasingly, attention is being focused on the usefulness of manpower information systems in the firm. The demand for this information emanates from three distinct levels. Level I: Manpower Information for Legal Compliance Decisions. The primary focus here is in developing information systems which provide necessary data for governmental units such as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Social Security Administration, and similar organizations which monitor employment practices, collect taxes, or engage in policy-making activities. Level 1I: Manpower Information as an Input to Manpower Planning. In this area, the objective is to provide management with data to be used in making numerous decisions regarding the allocation and pricing of human resources including recruitment, training, utilization, and termination. Level III: Manpower Information as an Input to the Valuation of Human Assets for External Reporting. Here, the objective is to provide independent information in the basic financial reports regarding heretofore unreported human assets possessed by the entity. While the accounting literature on human resources has dealt with all three levels of manpower information systems (e.g., see Picur [1973] and Flamholtz [1974]), most authors have given only cursory attention to the basic economic foundation underlying the existence of unrecorded human assets. Our purpose in this paper is to explore the economic and accounting assumptions underlying this literature and to develop criteria for the employee training conditions under which such assets might exist. In the economic literature, there already exists a reasonably well de-

The disclosure of corporate forecasts of projected annual earnings was a topic of intensive debate within the investment community during the years 1970-75. Questions of accuracy, objectivity, independent certification, and investment utility were examined from a number of theoretic and pragmatic viewpoints.' Most of these inquiries appear to assume that an investor's beliefs and/or actions may be affected by the disclosure of a management forecast, and several explore the possible rewards and sanctions that a firm may experience as a result of forecast accuracy. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesized information content of management forecasts through the examination of the common stock price behavior which accompanied the voluntary disclosure of 336 forecasts of annual earnings per share during the years 1963-67. The results reported here indicate that these forecast disclosures were accompanied by significant price adjustments, from which the inference may be drawn that either the data presented in a management forecast, the act of voluntary disclosure, or both, convey information to investors.