The solution to the problem of portfolio choice is relevant in a positive financial economics context because it provides models of individual maximizing behavior which when aggregated to the level of the market provide models of equilibrium asset pricing. These models generally assume that the parameters of the probability distribution of security returns are known to individual investors. In practice, however, the individual has to estimate these parameters. To the extent that there is parameter uncertainty or “estimation risk”, what are the observable implications of a market equilibrium derived on the assumption that the information set of all investors is equivalent to a given set of sample data?

Reviews the book "Law Review," 2nd ed., by Joseph L. Frascona.

We examine the utility of the statistical factor model of the process generating stock returns in the context of event studies. For a variety of estimation procedures and experimental designs we find limited value added relative to the use of a simple market model. We would attribute this finding to misspecification of the statistical factor analysis model, and suspect that there exist more robust procedures for estimating the factor structure of stock returns.

Reviews the book "C.P.A. Law Review," 3rd ed., by Joseph L. Frascona.

Reviews the book "C.P.A. Law Manual," by Andrew J. Coppola and Harry Katz.

1. Absolute Cost Advantage: High levels of advertising may create costs for potential entrants greater than those faced by existing firms when they entered. 2. Scale Economies: If there exist scale economies in advertising, defined as a greater than proportional increase in quantity sold per given increase in units of advertising,' potential entrants must either incur higher advertising costs per unit of output than existing firms or increase output. But increasing output increases industry supply, thus lowering prices, increasing advertising competition from established firms, or both, depending upon the structure of the particular industry. 3. Pecuniary Economies of Scale: Lower prices per ad for large advertisers via quantity discounts, etc., may prevail.

A NUMBER OF AUTHORS argue that a Bayesian posterior odds criterion is appropriate for model selection.2 This paper considers how to derive this criterion when there is minimal prior information. We propose minimizing measures of prior information relative to the models in question rather than relative to the parameters of the particular models. In so doing, we obtain an expression for the odds that is invariant to the parameterization of the particular models and overcomes certain well known finite sample limiting problems. We illustrate this procedure using two popular measures of information derived from the well known Shannon [26] measure. By minimizing these measures with the sample size held fixed, we obtain the same model selection criterion that Schwarz [25] derived asymptotically for large sample sizes. This expression has a number of desirable properties and is computationally no more

Pathways to Education is a comprehensive support program developed to improve academic outcomes of high school students from very poor social-economic backgrounds. The program includes proactive mentoring, daily tutoring, and group activities, combined with intermediate and long-term incentives to reinforce a minimum degree of mandatory participation; it began in 2001 for entering grade 9 students living in Regent Park, the largest public housing project in Toronto. It expanded in 2007 to include two additional Toronto projects. Comparing students from other housing projects before and after the introduction of the program, high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment rates rose dramatically for Pathways-eligible students, in some cases by more than 50 percent.