Numerical approximations are presented for the expected utility of wealth over a single time period for a small investor who proportions her or his available capital between a risk-free asset and a risky stock. The stock price is assumed to be a log-stable random variable. The utility functional is logarithmic or isoeleastic (yaq, q extless 0). Analytic results are presented for special choices of model parameters, and for large and small time periods.

It is assumed that a collection of market agents can be treated as a statistical ensemble. Their market activities are depicted as the stochastic generation of market orders according to a Poisson process. The objective is to effectively describe the ‘temporal microstructure’, or moment-to-moment trading activities in asset markets. Two basic models, ‘dealership’ vs. ‘auction’ markets (and their variants) are put forth. Implications are drawn from each model. The implications include several testable hypotheses regarding the aggregate behavior of markets and market-makers as well as some qualitative insight into the transaction-to-transaction nature of realistic exchange processes.

Disclosures, Accounting changes, Informational content

A multiple equation nonlinear regression model with serially independent disturbances is considered. The estimation of the parameters in this model by maximum likelihood and minimum distance methods is discussed and our main subject is the relationship between these procedures. We establish that if the number of observations in a sample is sufficiently large, the iterated minimum distance procedure converges almost surely and the limit of this sequence of iterations is the quasi-maximum likelihood estimator.

Given the volume of material and the shortage of classroom time in many tax courses, instructors often resort to handouts to aid the student in understanding and applying complex provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. A popular and successful technique is the use of decision-trees, or flowcharts, to explain difficult rules. One of the more difficult set of rules for students to grasp is the determination of the amount of deduction to be allowed an individual taxpayer for a given charitable contribution of property.

Reviews the book "Management Control in Non-Profit Organizations," by Robert N. Anthony and Regina E. Herzlinger.

The article presents some empirical evidence of distributions of financial accounting ratios. Recent application of advanced statistical techniques to the traditional financial ratio analysis of companies has raised some question concerning the usefulness of these ratios for persons external to the firm. Melvin O'Connor's findings are of particular interest since he found that financial ratios provided little or no assistance in the determination of future rate of return rankings. Most of these studies have employed parametric statistical tools whose validity is somewhat dependent upon the nature of the underlying distribution of the data that is input to the model. The usefulness of studies that classify firms on the basis of accounting ratios can be enhanced considerably if the classification model can be used to make probability estimates about group membership for a particular firm. Such probability assessments are necessary inputs to expectation models. If the empirical distributions of financial accounting ratios were known, then a distribution function could be found for the linear combination of ratios that would be used in a classification model.