Lawrence B. Smith, Comment: Brueggeman-Peiser and Noland Papers, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 14, No. 4, Proceedings of 14th Annual Conference of the Western Finance Association, June 21-23, 1979 (Nov., 1979), pp. 801-803

Increasing attention has been focused, as of late, on the relatively low rate of rental housing starts and the increase in apartment conversions to condominium ownership. By some estimates, additions to owner–occupied housing stock since 1970 have occurred at twice the rate of addition to the rental stock, a pattern that has caused concern to some policymakers.

The demand for gambling, 155.—Elasticity of demand, 156.—Demand for bookmaking in Nevada, 157.—Parimutuel betting, 158.—Price, tax, and state revenue, 160.

With risky debt outstanding, stockholder actions aimed at maximizing the value of their equity claim can result in a reduction in the value of both the firm and its outstanding bonds. We examine ways in which debt contracts are written to control the conflict between bondholders and stockholders. We find that extensive direct restrictions on production/investment policy would be expensive to employ and are not observed. However, dividend and financing policy restrictions are written to give stockholders incentives to follow a firm-value-maximizing production/investment policy. Taking into account how contracts control the bondholder- stockholder conflict leads to a number of testable propositions about the specific form of the debt contract that a firm will choose.

Casual observers of the New York Stock Exchange are often dumbfounded by the frenetic behavior of its participants. If asked how such chaos generates accurate prices many academicians would reply that the ability to transact frequently is a virtue since it promotes prompt information dissemination and therefore market efficiency. However, in contrast to the NYSE where, during trading hours, trades may be consumated almost continuously, the Paris Stock Exchange trades each security only a handful of times a day. This continental contrast in market structure led us to reexamine the role of speed in markets. We have discovered that if sufficient uncertainty surrounds the dissemination of information, frequent transacting may be deleterious to market efficiency. In fact, in our paradigm we are able to show that our measure of market efficiency may be maximized when there is a unique, non-zero time interval between consecutive trades. The measure of efficiency used throughout the paper is minus the mean squared error. This measure was chosen to focus upon the information content of prices at times when they are posted (i.e., at times of tâtonnements). For this purpose we ignore costs of illiquidity and costs associated with obsolete information that would occur between tâtonnements. In this restricted sphere, maximazation of our efficiency measure is consistent with maximizing Social Pareto Optimality.

Jerome B. Baesel, Garry R. Stein, The Value of Information: Inferences from the Profitability of Insider Trading, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 553-571