Knowledge that Transforms

This paper investigates the stock price behavior of rival firms in the same industry as firms announcing stock repurchase tender offers. Using a sample of 134 repurchase announcements, the author finds that rival firms on average realize insignificant announcement-period abnormal returns. Negative rival stock price performance is detected over longer intervals surrounding the announcement period and for a subset of announcements which ex ante were identified as most likely to affect rivals. This evidence, however, is statistically weak and does little to alter the overall conclusion that the information in repurchase announcements is primarily firm-specific.

An extensive literature documents the role of financial markets in economic development. To help explain this relationship, this paper constructs an endogenous growth model in which a stock market emerges to allocate risk and explores how the stock market alters investment incentives in ways that change steady state growth rates. The paper demonstrates that stock markets accelerate growth by (1) facilitating the ability to trade ownership of firms without disrupting the productive processes occurring within firms and (2) allowing agents to diversify portfolios. Tax policy affects growth directly by altering investment incentives and indirectly by changing the incentives underlying financial contracts.

After the stock market crash of October 19, 1987, interest in nonlinear dynamics, especially deterministic chaotic dynamics, has increased in both the financial press and the academic literature. This has come about because the frequency of large moves in stock markets is greater than would be expected under a normal distribution. There are a number of possible explanations. A popular one is that the stock market is governed by chaotic dynamics. What exactly is chaos and how is it related to nonlinear dynamics? How does one detect chaos? Is there chaos in financial markets? Are there other explanations of the movements of financial prices other than chaos? The purpose of this paper is to explore these issues.

The authors develop a model in which the mode of acquisition conveys information concerning the value of the bidder. The model incorporates the possibility that offers containing both cash and stock can be made in a setting consistent with the U.S. tax code. The authors demonstrate that bidders with unfavorable private information about their equity value choose offers containing some stock to avoid the capital gains tax on sequences of cash offers. The model yields a number of unique predictions about the construction of acquisition offers. The authors present evidence consistent with the model.

The announcement of the sale of equity in a wholly owned subsidiary of a corporation is received by the market as good news about the value of the existing equity in the parent corporation. This is in stark contrast to announcements of other forms of public equity financing . The authors show that the apparent inconsistency between the market response to equity carve-out announcements and other forms of equity financing can be easily understood in the Myers and Majluf (1984) framework. It is shown that firms that resort to an equity carve-out will be firms that, on average, are being undervalued by the market.

The underpricing of initial public offerings that has been widely documented appears to be a short-run phenomenon. Issuing firms during 1975-84 substantially underperformed a sample of matching firms from the closing price on the first day of public trading to their three-year anniversaries. There is substantial variation in the under performance year-to-year and across industries, with companies that went public in high-volume years fairing the worst. The patterns are consistent with an initial public offering market in which (1) investors are periodically overoptimistic about the earnings potential of young growth companies, and (2) firms take advantage of these "windows of opportunity."

This paper examines an asset pricing model in which the Sharpe-Lintner capital asset pricing model and the zero-beta capital asset pricing model are special cases. The model allows the ratio of expected market risk premium to market variance, the conditional expected excess returns, and the risks to change over time. The results are found to be sensitive to the choice of the portfolio formation techniques. Significant time variability is shown in the conditional expected excess asset returns and risks and also in the reward-to-risk ratio.

ABSTRACT A positive slope of the yield curve is associated with a future increase in real economic activity: consumption (nondurables plus services), consumer durables, and investment. It has extra predictive power over the index of leading indicators, real short‐term interest rates, lagged growth in economic activity, and lagged rates of inflation. It outperforms survey forecasts, both in‐sample and out‐of‐sample. Historically, the information in the slope reflected, inter alia , factors that were independent of monetary policy, and thus the slope could have provided useful information both to private investors and to policy makers.

Section I: Introductin to Finance and the Mathematics of Continuous-Time Models 1 Modern Finance 2 Introduction to Portfolio Selection and Capital Market Theory: Static Analysis 3 On the Mathematics and Economic Assumptions of Continuous-Time Financial Models Section II: Optimum Consumption and Portfolio Selection in Continuous-Time Models 4. Lifetime Portfolio Selection under Uncertainty: The Continuous-Time Case 5. Optimum Consumption and Portfolio Rules in a Continuous-Time Model 6. Further Developments in theory of Optimal Consumption and Portfolio Selection Section III: Warrant and Option Pricing Theory 7. A Complete Model of Warrant Pricing the Maximizes Utility 8. Theory of Rational Option Pricing 9. Option Pricing when Underlying Stock Returns are Discontinuous 10. Further Developments in Option Pricing Theory Section IV: Contingent-Claims Analysis in the Theory of Corporate Finance and Financial Intermediation 11. A Dynamic General Equilibrium Model of the Asset Market and its Application to the Pricing of the Capital Structure of the Firm 12. On the Pricing of Corporate Debt: The Risk Structure of Interest Rates 13. On the Pricing of Contingent Claims and the Modigliani-Miller Theorem 14. Contingent Claims Analysis in the Theory of Corporate Finance and Financial Intermediation Section V: An Intertemporal-Equilibrium Theory of Finance 15. An Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model 16. A General Equilibrium Theory of Finance in Continuous-Time Section VI: Applications of the Continuous-Time Model to Selected Issues in Public Finance 17. An Asymptotic Theory of Growth Under Uncertainty 18. On Consumption-Indexed Public Pension Plans 19. An Analytic Derivation of the Cost of Loan Guarantees and Deposit Insurance 20. On the Cost of Deposit Insurance when there are Surveillance Costs

ABSTRACT This paper suggests that the interactions of security trades and quote revisions be modeled as a vector autoregressive system. Within this framework, a trade's information effect may be meaningfully measured as the ultimate price impact of the trade innovation. Estimates for a sample of NYSE issues suggest: a trade's full price impact arrives only with a protracted lag; the impact is a positive and concave function of the trade size; large trades cause the spread to widen; trades occurring in the face of wide spreads have larger price impacts; and, information asymmetries are more significant for smaller firms.