Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines the relationship between common stock and option holdings of managers and the choice of investment and financing decisions by firms. The authors find support for the hypothesis of a positive relationship between the security holdings of managers and the changes in firm variance and in financial leverage. This conclusion is based on samples of acquiring and divesting firms. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that executive security holdings have a role in reducing agency problems.

This paper establishes three empirical results. We find positive autocorrelation in actual intra‐day stock returns, in intra‐day returns computed from quote midpoints, and in the arrival of buy and sell orders. We present a model of return generation that incorporates these features via lagged adjustment of the limit‐order price and positive dependence in bid and ask transactions. The return model is observationally equivalent to an ARMA process, which is consistent with the observed return behavior.

Tests of asset‐pricing models are developed that allow expected risk premiums and market betas to vary over time. These tests exploit the relation between expected excess returns and current market values. Using weekly data for 1963 through 1982 on ten common stock portfolios formed according to equity capitalization, a single‐risk‐premium model is not rejected if the expected premium is time varying and is not constrained to correspond to a market factor. Conditional mean‐variance efficiency of a value‐weighted stock index is rejected, and the rejection is insensitive to how much variability of expected risk premiums is assumed.

This paper applies the multi‐period investment model to a universe of international securities on the basis of the simple probability assessment approach. Our principal findings are: 1) the gains from including non‐U.S. asset categories in the universe were remarkably large (in some cases statistically significant), especially for the highly risk‐averse strategies, 2) the gains from removing the no leverage constraint were more substantial than they were in the absence of non‐U.S. securities, and 3) there is strong evidence of market segmentation in that the optimal levels of investment in U.S. securities were mostly zero in the presence of the non‐U.S. asset categories.

This study explores the role of the method of payment in explaining common stock returns of bidding firms at the announcement of takeover bids. The results reveal significant differences in the abnormal returns between common stock exchanges and cash offers. The results are independent of the type of takeover bid, i.e., merger or tender offer, and of bid outcomes. These findings, supported by analysis of nonconvertible bonds, are attributed mainly to signalling effects and imply that the inconclusive evidence of earlier studies on takeovers may be due to their failure to control for the method of payment.

We characterize the sets of mimicking positions with returns that can serve in place of factors in an exact K ‐factor arbitrage‐pricing relation for a set of N assets. All of the sets are K ‐dimensional nonsingular linear transformations of each other. We interpret three examples of such transformations and discuss empirical considerations. We provide conditions under which the mimicking positions can be expressed as portfolios, and we characterize the relation between mimicking portfolios and the minimum‐variance frontier.

This paper documents a relationship between announcements of unexpected changes in financial policy and unexpected changes in performance of the firm. Using a new methodology that combines analysis of stock price movements and earnings forecast data, the authors provide evidence that analysts revise their earnings forecasts following the announcement of an unexpected dividend change by an amount positively related to the size of the unexpected dividend change. They also provide evidence that these revisions are positively related to the change in equity value surrounding the announcement. Further, they find that these revisions are consistent with rationality. Their results therefore provide direct evidence consistent with the hypothesis that unexpected dividend changes signal information about firm performance to market participants.

This paper investigates the cost structure of savings and loans. Most studies of financial institutions have failed to take into account the multiproduct nature of these institutions. Using the multiproduct approach, the existence of subadditivity, multiproduct global and product‐specific economies of scale and scope, and substitutability between inputs is investigated. A translogarithmic cost function is estimated using 1982 data on California savings and loans. Restrictive functional forms also estimated are rejected. Standard errors for the statistics calculated are estimated, and various statistical tests are conducted. Previous authors have not calculated standard errors for these statistics. No evidence of subadditivity in the industry is found.

The authors examine equilibrium credit contracts and allocations under different competitivity specifications and explain the economic roles of collateral under these specifications. Both moral hazard and adverse selection are considered. The principal message is that how a competitive equilibrium is conceptualized significantly affects the characterization of equilibrium credit contracts. Specifically, some well-known results in the rationing literature are shown to rest delicately on the adopted equilibrium concept. Two somewhat surprising results emerge. First, high-quality borrowers with unlimited collateral may be priced out of the market despite the bank having idle deposits. Second, high-quality borrowers may put up more collateral.