Knowledge that Transforms

This paper demonstrates that the response of nominal interest rates to changes in inflationary expectations should lie between that predicted by the “Fisher” and “Darby” effects. The exact nature of the response will depend on the relative size of the income and capital gains tax rates, and the relative size of the derivatives of investment and savings to their respective after‐tax real rates. The other major conclusion of this paper is that capital gains taxation offsets the negative effect on investment produced by treating depreciation on a historic rather than a replacement cost basis.

Roll has recently formulated an option pricing model which allows dividend payments on the underlying stock. This paper compares the performance of the exact Roll model with a modified, but inexact, Black‐Scholes model. The results indicate that the Roll model prices are significantly closer to actual market prices.

Conditions are derived under which all consumers in a production and exchange economy will prefer (at least weakly) disclosure of public information to no such disclosure. The conditions involve consumer endowments, the allocative efficiency of the financial market, and value maximizing behavior by firms. Cases exist where consumers will prefer disclosure of public information in a production and exchange economy, although they would be indifferent to such disclosure in an otherwise similar pure exchange economy. The difference in results is due purely to the fact that in production and exchange economies, information may be used to reallocate resources across time and firms, thus highlighting the fundamental difference between the role of information in pure exchange and in production and exchange economies.

Many financial futures markets allow substitutions for the par grade of security at delivery. Substitutes are deliverable at premiums or discounts—“differences” in commodities parlance—to the futures price. The rule that establishes these differences is called a difference system. This paper characterizes financial futures market equilibrium with yield‐based difference systems and investigates particular systems in use. The major finding is that currently used difference systems effectively limit deliverable supply in the futures markets and lead to futures prices which understate the cash market price of the par security.

Increasing awareness of the potential risks involved in lending to heavily indebted governments focuses attention on credit pricing in the Eurodollar market. This paper utilizes a recent survey of country‐by‐country risk assessments as perceived by lenders to show that a systematic relationship exists between these assessments and interest rates in the Euromarket. The relationship is derived from an underlying model described in the paper. The estimated parameters verify a number of hypotheses, providing insights on the loss rates lenders expect to incur in case of default.

In this paper we consider the role of financial intermediaries in the valuation of firms and projects. We show that security prices should reflect both used and unused debt capacity if some corporations can act as financial intermediaries and can capture the tax benefits of debt capacity unused by the operating firm. We also provide some reasons why the value of the firm might be increased if the financing and operating risks of the firm are separated and financial intermediaries issue debt rather than the unit operating the asset.