PRICES AND QUANTITIES iS the brilliant and disturbing last work of Arthur M. Okun (1928-1980). For more than a decade Okun was the foremost practitioner of macroeconomics in the United States. His critical intelligence at both the theoretical and empirical ends of economics was unsurpassed. These facts were virtually a manufacturer's warranty that the book, whatever its argumentation and evidence, would be significant; we want to know what Okun thought. But this background was no guarantee of an important treatise, and it must have taken some courage to venture a big theoretical work, in an accessible style, on urgent questions. In fact, Okun has delivered a creative and virtuosic study in economic theory. The book's contribution is to provide a complete description of an economy in which rational economic agents consider the distributional consequences of wage and price decisions. The perspective adopted, one which is winning growing favor of late, is contract-theoretic. Because they wish to economize on their costly transactions with one another, people trade repeatedly with the same agent; so trust and fidelity to understandings are important. The ensuing analysis lodges some basic dissents from the informational-expectational paradigm developed over the last score of years. It is particularly stimulating, and troubling, on the main policy controversy of the decade, the question of disinflation.

Boquist, Racette, and Schlarbaum [3] and Livingston [6] show that a security systematic risk may be expressed as a function of its duration. These results have led to research examining the role of duration in explaining systematic risk, but Lanstein and Sharpe [5] indicate that Livingston's expression relies on the implicit assumption that extra-market covariances between securities are insignificant. Lanstein and Sharpe argue that such an assumption is unwarranted. They find a significant negative relationship between extra-market covariances and differences in duration between paired samples of common stock. Their paper suggests that duration may be associated with unsystematic risk and that any relation between duration and systematic risk is more complex than implied in [3] and [6].

Cost allocation, Independent Cost Proportional Scheme, Joint costs, Moriarity scheme

The recent experience of increased volatility of exchange rates among major currencies coupled with highly unstable price levels necessitates a more fundamental understanding of exchange risk. This necessity is further enhanced by the increased internationalization of consumption, investment, and other aspects of economic activity.

S ince the breakdown of the par-value system there has been a dramatic increase in the variability of exchange rates. Often the question is raised whether this variation is rational or whether it is the outcome of disorderly markets which are bereft of stabilizing speculation or-even worse-are dominated by destabilizing speculation. The considerable research stimulated by this issue has yet to yield conclusive results, and whether the foreign-exchange market is rational or efficient is still an open question.' Of course, the market is not an abstraction but is comprised of flesh-and-blood participants whose behavior may show varying degrees of rationality. This paper utilizes a new body of data to undertake a preliminary investigation into the market behavior of one major group of participants: U.S. firms whose foreign-currency positions are regularly reported to the U.S. Government.

Abstract ABSTRACT: This paper presents the results of a study which undertakes to evaluate whether the PLATO time-sharing system and the introductory accounting modules residing on this system are an effective tutorial medium for introductory accounting Thru study was replicated over a different population in each of three different time periods and involved an examination of both the financial and managerial modules. The results for the three periods indicate that PLATO can be an effective tutorial medium, particularly where the financial modules are employed.

This paper has developed a model of bank margins or spreads in which the bank is viewed as a risk-averse dealer. It was demonstrated that an interest spread or margin would always exist, and that this was the result of transactions uncertainty faced by the bank. Moreover, it was shown that this pure spread depended on four factors: the degree of managerial risk aversion; the size of transactions undertaken by the bank; bank market structure; and the variance of interest rates. The model implied that liability and asset structures had to be analyzed together since they were directly interrelated through transactions uncertainty. It was shown that because of this transactions uncertainty, hedging behavior was perfectly rational within an expected utility maximizing framework. Extending the model from a structure with one kind of loan and deposit to loans and deposits with many maturities should lead to further interesting insights into margin determination especially as “portfolio” effects may become apparent.