Knowledge that Transforms

[This article develops and estimates a simple model for monthly expected stock returns that relies on the rapidly decaying structure of shorter-horizon (weekly) expected returns. The most striking aspect of our findings is that the rapid mean reversion in short-horizon expected returns implies much greater variation through time in monthly expected returns than has been documented in earlier studies. For instance, during the 1962 to 1985 period, over 25 percent of the return variance of small firms can be explained by time variation in expected returns.]

[This article develops a model of competitive bidding with a resale market. The primary market is modeled as a common-value auction, in which bidders participate for the purpose of resale. After the auction the winning bidders sell the objects in a secondary market, and the buyers in the secondary market receive information about the bids submitted in the auction. The effect of this information linkage between the primary auction and the secondary market on bidding behavior in the primary auction is examined. The auctioneer's expected revenues from organizing the primary market as a discriminatory auction versus a uniform-price auction are compared, and sufficient conditions under which the uniform-price auction will yield higher expected revenues are obtained. An example of our model, with the primary market organized as a discriminatory auction, is the U.S. Treasury bill market.]

[This article presents a model that provides insights about various measures of portfolio performance. The model explores several criticisms of these measures. These include the problem of identifying an appropriate benchmark portfolio, the possibility of overestimating risk because of market-timing ability, and the failure of informed investors to earn positive risk-adjusted returns because of increasing risk aversion. The article argues that these need not be serious impediments to performance evaluation.]

The author presents a self-contained exposition of selected topics in the theory of financial markets with applications to corporate finance. The book covers only topics sanctioned by tradition. About one-quarter of the book is devoted to the one-period model with certainty. Half the book deals with the one-period model with uncertainty, and the remaining quarter with multiperiod models with uncertainty, both discrete and continuous. The one-period model with certainty starts with topics from the standard theory of the consumer and discusses consumer preferences and their representation by utility functions. The author then defines arbitrage trading strategies and uses the assumed properties of preferences to show that equilibrium in this model excludes arbitrage trading strategies. In the absence of arbitrage trading strategies all securities earn the same rate of return. The price functional, which maps terminal cash flows into initial prices, is additive, and the irrelevance of corporate financial structure and dividend policy follows from the additivity of the price functional.

Journal Article Market Trading Structures and Asset Pricing: Evidence from the Treasury-Bill Markets Get access Avraham Kamara Avraham Kamara University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 1, Issue 4, October 1988, Pages 357–375, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/1.4.357 Published: 14 March 2015

This article suggests that the lack of use of rights offerings in the United States, a phenomenon referred to as the equity underwriting paradox, can be explained by transaction costs. A sample of underwritten rights offerings provides support for the explanation. Firms making underwritten rights offerings paid lower underwriter fees but incurred significantly larger price drops just prior to the offering than did firms making underwritten offerings. Further analysis reveals that the underwritten-rights-offering price concessions are a form of transaction cost that is not found in underwritten public offerings.

This article investigates the structure on preferences required to derive Ross's arbitrage pricing theory (APT). It is shown that only ordinal preferences are required. In particular, the APT does not require that agents possess preferences representable as risk-averse expected utility functions. This characteristic of the APT is not shared by the standard equilibrium-based capital asset pricing models.

Most modern financial research can be characterized as theoretical or empirical, or a mix of the two. Theoretical finance can be divided in the way that theoretical economics is. Neoclassical research stems from the neoclassical economics of perfectly competitive markets that have no imperfections or frictions, such, as taxes, transaction costs, externalities, or information asymmetries. By definition, imperfect markets research includes all other topics, such as the study of taxes, institutions, and topics stemming from information economics. Darrell Duffie's new book is an introduction to neoclassical finance that emphasizes topics in the intersection of theoretical finance and the mathematical economics of general equilibrium. The book is designed to take the student from first principles to the frontiers of finance-oriented general equilibrium theory. The book contains a rigorous introduction to the necessary topics in probability and stochastic control and is a good source for that material. It also contains a good summary of general equilibrium theory, including the required background mathematics. Each theorem from the general equilibrium literature is presented in a form that is general enough to be applicable to continuous-time models in finance but is as simple as possible given that level of generality. Other variations are mentioned in the literature reviews at the end of each section.

Journal Article A Message from the President of the Society for Financial Studies Get access Joseph Williams Joseph Williams New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1, January 1988, Pages 1–2, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/1.1.1 Published: 03 April 2015

We examine the sale of equity within the context of a model of negotiation between a firm and a less well informed purchaser. We introduce a simple form of negotiation by allowing the firm to set the price of the issue and by assuming that the purchase is a financier-underwriter who acts strategically. This transaction is analyzed as a noncooperative game, and we identify sequential equilibria that are consistent with observed behavior: namely that negotiations occasionally fail, that market reactions to equity offers are not uniformly negative, and that equity placements are often underpriced.