Knowledge that Transforms

The primary purpose of this paper is the use of survey expectations data to study the empirical relationships between stock returns, inflation, and economic activity. In the course of this analysis and as a secondary purpose, the paper discusses general considerations involving the use of expectations proxies and makes recommendations for econometric techniques. The main empirical findings are: (1) Hypothesized relationships between expected economic activity and expected inflation do not in practice appear to be important in explaining the negative relationship between expected inflation and stock returns. (2) Nevertheless, the survey data do lend some support to the hypothesis of a quantity theory relationship between expected inflation and expected economic activity, holding constant monetary growth. (3) The cross-forecaster dispersion of economic activity forecasts, a proxy for real uncertainty, appears to be a significant determinant of stock returns. Inclusion of this variable eliminates the negative impact of expected inflation.

The behavior of different components of municipal bond yields may have a significant impact upon bond price behavior. Specifically, demand premiums created by banks may stabilize bond yields in some maturity ranges but not in others; for example, short‐term municipals may be stabilized but not long‐term. This research implies that bank demand behavior may create demand premiums that stabilize prices of short‐term municipal bonds relative to those of Treasury bonds of like maturity. While this implication is inconsistent with the residual theory of bank demand, it is consistent with the tax‐shield theory attributed to Hendershott and Koch [3, 4].

Thomas B. Hazuka, Consumption Betas and Backwardation in Commodity Markets, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 39, No. 3, Papers and Proceedings, Forty-Second Annual Meeting, American Finance Association, San Francisco, CA, December 28-30, 1983 (Jul., 1984), pp. 647-655

This paper extends Merton's intertemporal capital asset pricing model with multiple consumers to include a description of the supply of traded securities. The production decisions of firms are described in a model with stochastic investment opportunities and incomplete markets. Firms maximize the welfare of their stockholders based on the sum of dollar values placed on the projects by shareholders of the firm. The monetary value to stockholders of a marginal change in the contract structure due to changing firm production is analyzed. In this setting, the competitive market achieves an appropriately defined Nash‐Constrained Pareto Optimum. Sufficient conditions for investor unanimity, market‐value maximization by firms, and the equilibrium to achieve a Constrained Pareto Optimum and full Pareto Optimum are derived.

Stability tests are performed for the conventional U.S. money demand equation using switch regression techniques. This methodology provides for the identification of the shift point and the type of shift (abrupt or drift), and is conducive to hypothesis testing to determine the sources of the shift for the regression equation. Our findings do not support the contention that the 1974 change in money demand equation is a downward shift in the constant term, as suggested by many recent empirical money demand studies.

In this paper a systematic procedure is developed to determine necessary conditions for all degrees of stochastic dominance. The previously known necessary conditions are specified as to which degrees of dominance they belong, and two new necessary conditions, a ranking of harmonic means and a ranking of algebraic combinations of the first three moments, are derived.