Knowledge that Transforms

This paper discusses general principles for choosing bank assets and liabilities, for deciding on when to make a loan and what interest rate to charge, for pricing funds transfer services such as the handling of checks, for establishing compensating balance requirements, and for dealing with government regulation. The discussion assumes markets are efficient and deals first with an unregulated environment and then with policies in the face of regulatory constraints. Most of the policies which would be optimal in an unregulated environment will be optimal in the regulated environment such as in the U.S. today, because it is relatively easy to get around most of the regulations that are applied to banks by the use of non-deposit liabilities, compensating balances and negative checking accounts.

The paper studies both the initial and aftermarket performance (measured by risk-adjusted returns) on newly issued common stocks which were offered to the public during the 1960s. The results confirm that average initial performance is positive (11.4 percent), while the distribution of returns is skewed so that the subscriber of a single random new issue offering has about an equal chance for gain or loss. The results are generally consistent with aftermarket efficiency. Positive initial performance along with aftermarket efficiency indicate that new issue offerings are underpriced. The paper provides insights into this underpricing mystery, but does not solve it.

The principle of stochastic dominance is used to characterize the optimal efficient sets when the distributions of the random prospects belong to a family. Most of the well-known distributions are considered. In each case, the optimal efficient sets are characterized by easily verifiable conditions on the parameters of the distributions. These optimal efficient sets are then compared with the corresponding mean-variance (MV) efficient set. It is often found that the optimal efficient sets are proper subsets of the MV efficient set. Thus, the MV criterion is a proper efficiency criterion, but the MV efficient set can be excessively large compared to the optimal efficient set.

Owners of capital frequently lack knowledge about investment opportunities. One alternative is to turn to a manager for assistance. The owner's problem of contracting for the services of a manager is treated as a problem in buying information. The surprising result is that it is sometimes possible to trade information even when the owner is unable to form his own assessment of the information's value. Under some conditions it is possible to write a managerial compensation contract which will induce the manager to act in the best interests of the owner. These conditions require owner knowledge of the manager's employment and investment alternatives and risk preferences as well as some, but not all, of the characteristics of the investment opportunities.

The effect of a syndicate's uncertainty regarding the demand for a new bond issue on the syndicate's choice of an offer and bid price, and on the spread between those two prices, is analyzed. Then, the impact of uncertainty on the spread is empirically tested. The hypothesis that the spread varies inversely with the number of bidders for an issue is also developed and tested, and several other hypothesized determinants of the spread are examined.

This paper examines the robustness of one month treasury bills as predictors of inflation. The evidence is inconsistent with the joint hypothesis that (1) the expected real rate of interest was constant for one-month bills and (2) that markets are efficient with regard to the time series of inflation. When the expected real rate of interest is set equal to the conditional expectation given the time series of real rates, the results are much more consistent with the efficient markets model. In more positive terms, the failure to confirm market efficiency appears to be the result of naive estimates of the expected real rate.

The focus of this paper is on the benefits to investors, arising out of the integration of the capital markets of different countries. The notion that an expansion in the opportunity set of individual investors causes improvements in their welfare is analyzed to take account of the effects on their wealth. With the supplies of investments held constant, the effects of changes in the macroparameters of the risk-return pricing relationship, caused by the merger of capital markets, on the wealth of individuals in the new equilibrium, are determined. Using three specific utility functions – quadratic, exponential and logarithmic – it is shown that international capital market integration is Pareto-optimal, i.e., the welfare of individuals in the economies considered never declines, and will generally improve. The effect of expansion of the opportunity set, due to the integration of capital markets, nullifies the effect of a possible negative change in wealth.

A continuous time model for optimal consumption, portfolio and life insurance rules, for an investor with an arbitrary but known distribution of lifetime, is derived as a generalization of the model by Merton (1971). The classic Tobin-Markowitz separation theorem obtains with the mutual funds being identical to those obtained under the assumption of certain lifetime. The investor is found to have a ‘human capital’ component of wealth, which is independent of his preferences and risky market opportunities and represents the certainty equivalent of his future net (wage) earnings. Explicit solutions, which are linear in wealth, are found for the investor with constant relative risk aversion.