Knowledge that Transforms

Hidden capital exists whenever the accounting measure of a firm's net worth diverges from its economic value. Such unbooked capital has on-balance-sheet and off-balance-sheet sources. This paper develops a model to estimate both forms of hidden capital and to test hypotheses about their determinants. In effect, the analysis expands the two-index model by endogenizing the market and interest-rate sensitivities of any stock and decomposing each sensitivity into on-balance-sheet and off-balance-sheet elements. For a sample of banks during 1975-85, the model finds considerable variation in both forms of hidden capital.

Studies that test for an average stock price effect of antitakeover amendments present different results, disagreeing with respect to both the significance and the direction of the effect. This study determines whether effects can be identified when managerial share ownership and amendment type are considered. Results suggest a negative relation between managerial share ownership and the stock price reaction to all but fair price amendment proposals.

This paper presents new empirical evidence of predictability of individual stock returns. The negative first-order serial correlation in monthly stock returns is highly significant. Furthermore, significant positive serial correlation is found at longer lags, and the twelve-month serial correlation is particularly strong. Using the observed systematic behavior of stock return, one-step-ahead return forecasts are made and ten portfolios are formed from the forecasts. The difference between the abnormal returns on the extreme decile portfolios over the period 1934-87 is 2.49 percent per month.

This paper finds a high correlation between the open to close returns for U.S. stocks in the previous trading day and the Japanese equity market performance in the current period. In contrast, the Japanese market has only a small impact on the U.S. return in the current period. High correlations among open to close returns are a violation of the efficient market hypothesis; however, in trading simulation, the excess profits in Japan vanish when transactions costs and transfer taxes are included.

Empirical evidence of time varying term premia in bond returns is frequently interpreted as evidence against the expectations hypothesis. This paper shows that the expectations hypothesis can actually imply time varying term premia if the time frame for which the expectations hypothesis holds differs from the return measurement period. Furthermore, many of the properties of these term premia are consistent with those of observed term premia. These results are important because they imply that the case against the expectations hypothesis is weaker than claimed in the empirical literature.

This paper shows that the spread between the three-month Treasury bill and the federal funds rate has significant predictive power for the future change in the federal funds rate during the volatile nonborrowed reserves operating regime, but it has less and no predictive power during the borrowed reserves regime and the federal funds targeting regime, respectively. These findings suggest that Treasury bill rates forecast future federal funds rates most accurately when the Federal Reserve follows a well-defined rule that does not smooth the impact of shocks on the federal funds rate.

The fact that investment policies are often restricted appears to have been neglected in the performance measurement literature. This paper, using a standard information model, shows how the introduction of constraints on the proportion of assets to be invested in the market affect the expected portfolio returns and the value of a portfolio manager's performance. The results are related to the classical Treynor and Mazuy (1966) conjectures about characteristic lines.

An intertemporal general equilibrium model relates financial asset returns to movements in aggregate output. The model is a standard neoclassical growth model with serial correlation in aggregate output. Changes in aggregate output lead to attempts by agents to smooth consumption, which affects the required rate of return on financial assets. Since aggregate output is serially correlated and, hence, predictable, the theory suggests that stock returns can be predicted based on rational forecasts of output. The empirical results confirm that stock returns are a predictable function of aggregate output and also support the accompanying implications of the model.

The author shows, in a model of competitive banks, that the characteristics of loan contracts are affected by product market imperfections in the borrower's industry. A bank loan commitment increases the value of a borrower firm operating in an imperfectly competitive industry and, thus, dominates a simple loan even in the absence of risk sharing considerations and informational asymmetries between the borrower and the bank. While it is individually rational for a firm to obtain a loan commitment, all the firms in that industry taken together are made worse off by the existence of loan commitments.