Knowledge that Transforms

An examination of the provisions of bond issues reveals that most bonds prohibit firms from calling the issue during the initial years, after which time the bond can be called at the option of the firm. A substantial number of firms, however, also reserve the right to call the issue during this initial period for purposes other than refinancing at a lower coupon rate. The additional flexibility which accompanies the option of early redemption can be used to reduce the agency costs of debt associated with future investment opportunities, informational asymmetry, and the risk incentive problem. Using a sample of newly issued bonds, statistical tests are performed to show that there are, in fact, differences between firms which do and do not reserve the right of early redemption. This paper shows that these differences provide empirical evidence which is consistent with the hypothesis that firms use the option of early redemption to reduce agency costs.

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.

This paper describes situations in which tax liabilities assume the form of a negative position in a call option. This structure motivates an examination of the investment decisions of taxed corporations in the presence of risk. It is shown that the structure of the tax liability creates an incentive to underinvest in more risky projects and an incentive for conglomerate merger. These effects are then evaluated in the presence of conflicts of interest between stockholders and bondholders, and under alternative assumptions about the tax code, and about the timing of investment and financing decisions.

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.

Sell-off activities arise when a firm sells part of its assets (e.g., a segment, a division, etc.) but continues to exist in essentially the same form. This study investigates the effect of voluntary sell-offs on stock returns. From a sample of over 1000 sell-off events (first public announcements), the evidence shows that both sellers and buyers earn significant positive excess returns from these transactions. The excess returns earned by buyers are smaller than those earned by sellers. There is also evidence that sell-off announcements are preceded by a period of significant negative returns for the sellers which suggests that the sellers, on average, performed poorly prior to their sell-off activities.

This paper tests the tax explanation of the January effect by examining small firm stock returns before the War Revenue Act of 1917. No evidence of a turn‐of‐the‐year effect is found. This paper also extends previous authors' work on the subject to 1918–29. A January effect is found during that period.

This paper presents tests designed to determine whether the weekly pattern in stock returns continues after the introduction of futures trading on stock indexes and whether the pattern carries over to the futures market. Using data for the SP500, I find that the “Monday effect” does persist in the cash market, but there is no evidence of a similar pattern in the futures market.

The Black-Scholes call option pricing model exhibits systematic empirical biases. The Merton call option pricing model, which explicitly admits jumps in the underlying security return process, may potentially eliminate these biases. We provide statistical evidence consistent with the existence of lognormally distributed jumps in a majority of the daily returns of a sample of NYSE listed common stocks. However, we find no operationally significant differences between the Black-Scholes and Merton model prices of the call options written on the sampled common stocks.

Security market line (SML) analysis, while an important tool, has never been fully justified from a theoretical standpoint. Assuming symmetric information and an inefficient index, we show that SML analysis can be grossly misleading, since, in general, efficient and inefficient portfolios can plot above and below the SML. On a more positive note, if SML analysis uses the return on a marketed riskless asset for the zero‐beta rate, efficient portfolios must plot above the SML. Nonetheless, arbitrarily inefficient portfolios also plot above the SML.