Special items, Extraordinary items, Market efficiency, Disclosures

As an alteration of the firm's productive asset portfolio, divestiture is the mirror-image of asset acquisition or merger. Yet, though significant efforts have been expended by researchers into the implications of acquisition and merger, the literature of finance is all but silent on the subject of divestiture.

In Gonedes [5], the results of an empirical analysis of accounting-based and market-based estimates of systematic risk were presented. These results suggested that there is, in general, a “statistically significant” relationship between accounting-based and market-based estimates of systematic risk at the level of individual securities, if the accounting-based estimates are conditional upon first-differences or scaled first-differences of the accounting numbers. The differencing transformation seemed to induce relatively better specified models for the accounting numbers.

The growing sensitivity of savings deposits to flow in response to changes in interest rate differentials has become so commonplace in the past decade that the term “disintermediation” has become a part of the economists' vocabulary. It is a major conclusion of this paper that the volatility of savings deposits began to increase as early as 1950 for savings and loan associations and credit unions and as early as 1945 for mutual savings banks. As an indication of this, we proxy changes in the competitive environment for savings deposits by making yearly estimates of the elasticity of savings deposits with respect to deposit rates at savings and loan associations, mutual savings banks, and credit unions.

A financial decision model of the firm, in which most prior deterministic decision models' assumptions were relaxed, was developed and solved for its policy and state variables' time-optimal trajectories. In particular, the three alternative modes of corporate financing, with their respective explicit and implicit costs, were treated as distinct, time-variant decision variables. In addition, their dynamic interdependent relationship with the firm's investment-possibilities schedule was clearly delineated. Besides eliminating the usual constant returns assumption, our model further introduced a dividends discount factor which was an explicit function of the firm's debt-equity ratio.Furthermore, despite the generality of the model solutions, valuable economic implications were determined; namely, (1) conditions for the existence of a steady-state equilibrium were established with the critical role of nonproportional external equity flotation costs being observed; (2) the firm's dynamic equilibrium path was locally unstable in the initial, high-growth phase of its life cycle and was locally stable in its declining-growth stage–a result consistent with the growth literature in security valu ation theory; and (3) the usual assumptions of the balanced-growth path models are sufficient for the optimality of their decision policies.

The content of the basic course in finance is analyzed in terms of a number of dimensions. My presentation will focus on six areas: (1) our clients and their needs, (2) the managerial orientation, (3) coverage, (4) role of specialized techniques, (5) application to other purposive organizations, and (6) social responsibility issues.

Early studies on the effect of holding company affiliation on bank performance yield some curious results (see [9], [11], [12]). Specifically, these studies did not find that holding company affiliation results in changes in capital-asset ratios or bank profitability.

Journal Article On a Theorem of Arrow: Comment Get access Kenneth J. Arrow Kenneth J. Arrow Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 42, Issue 3, July 1975, Pages 487–488, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296863 Published: 01 July 1975

Budgeting, Human behavior, Internal control

I. Price risk versus quantity risk, 520. — II. Noninformative equilibrium: simple consumptive gamble, 525. — III. Informative equilibrium: prior-trading optimum and compound consumptive gamble, 529. — IV. Conclusion: determinants of speculative-hedging behavior, 538. — V. Limitations and generalizations, 540.