Knowledge that Transforms

With a graduated personal tax schedule, Miller showed that there could be an equilibrium debt supply for the corporate sector as a whole. In the presence of uncertainty there is also a unique debt/equity ratio for each individual firm, and this ratio is related to the firm's operational risk characteristics. However, if firms merge and spin off in response to tax incentives, the identity of firms is ambiguous and only the corporate sector is a meaningful construct. These arguments are developed in both discrete and continuous models that employ extensions of the arbitrage-free pricing theory.

Discrete‐time models of asset pricing have hitherto generally avoided studying the relationship between the underlying technology inherent in the economy and the determinants of the price of capital. A fully articulated economy is constructed in which there is a nontrivial technology for producing capital. The existence of adjustment costs in augmenting the quantity of capital has interesting implications for the stochastic properties of asset prices, as well as other macroeconomic variables. Examples of such economies are used to illustrate this point.

This paper provides new tests of the arbitrage pricing theory (APT). Test results appear to be extremely sensitive to the number of securities used in the two stages of the tests of the APT model. New tests also indicate that unique risk is fully as important as common risk. While these tests have serious limitations, they are inconsistent with the APT.

The Hotelling Valuation Principle (HVP) implies that the unit value of an exhaustible natural resource can be written as a function of its current price, net of extraction costs; other variables such as interest rates have no additional explanatory power. The results of earlier tests using data from 1979–1981 strongly support the HVP. This paper presents a series of follow-up tests using time-series cross-section data covering the period August 1981 to December 1983. Because the variance of petroleum prices in this period was substantially less than in the earlier period, the follow-up sample proved generally noninformative. The sample also contains some observations on oil and gas royalty trusts. Tests of the HVP using these trust data yielded generally satisfactory results, although—given the limited sample size—the results must be viewed with caution.