Knowledge that Transforms

This paper uses the betting market for professional basketball games to address the issue of unexplained asset price volatility. A pricing model is presented that identifies two components in point spreads for professional basketball games. Both components–the market's estimate of relative team abilities and an idiosyncratic factor–are essentially unobserved but can be identified ex post. The structure of this market enables tests of competing hypotheses about point spread variation. The tests reject the hypothesis that variation in the two components represents irrelevant noise. The hypothesis that unobserved fundamentals account for this variation is consistent with the data.

The authors provide evidence that the spread between commodity spot and futures prices (the basis) reflects the macroeconomic risks common to all asset markets. The basis of many commodities is correlated with the stock index dividend yield and corporate bond quality spread. Explanatory power is related to exposure to macroeconomic fluctuations: about 40 percent of the variation in the basis of a portfolio of commodities with high business cycle sensitivity is explained by the stock and bond yields. Further diagnostics indicate that these associations are largely due to the presence of risk premiums, rather than spot price forecasts, in the basis.

This paper uses a vector autoregressive model to decompose excess stock and ten-year bond returns into changes in expectations of future stock dividends, inflation, short-term real interest rates, and excess stock and bond returns. In monthly postwa r U.S. data, stock and bond returns are driven largely by news about future excess stock returns and inflation, respectively. Real intere st rates have little impact on returns, although they do affect the short-term nominal interest rate and the slope of the term structure. These findings help to explain the low correlation between excess st ock and bond returns.

Two proposals are made that may facilitate the creation of derivative market instruments, such as futures contracts, cash settled based on economic indices. The first proposal concerns index number construction: indices based on infrequent measurements of nonstandardized items may control for quality change by using a hedonic repeated measures method, an index number construction method that follows individual assets or subjects through time and also takes account of measured quality variables. The second proposal is to establish markets for perpetual claims on cash flows matching indices of dividends or rents. Such markets may help us to measure the prices of the assets generating these dividends or rents even when the underlying asset prices are difficult or impossible to observe directly. A perpetual futures contract is proposed that would cash settle every day in terms of both the change in the futures price and the dividend or rent index for that day.

The authors examine managerial investment decisions in the presence of imperfect information and short-term managerial objectives. Prior research has argued that such an environment induces managers to underinvest in long-run projects. The authors show that short-term objectives and imperfect information may also lead to overinvestment and they identify how the direction of the distortion depends upon the type of informational imperfection present. When investors cannot observe the level of investment in the long-run project, suboptimal investment will be induced. When investors can observe investment but not its productivity, however, overinvestment will occur.

This paper defines the news impact curve that measures how new information is incorporated into volatility estimates. Various new and existing ARCH models, including a partially nonparametric one, are compared and estimated with daily Japanese stock return data. New diagnostic tests are presented that emphasize the asymmetry of the volatility response to news. The authors' results suggest that the model by L. Glosten, R. Jagannathan, and D. Runkle (1989) is the best parametric model. The EGARCH also can capture most of the asymmetry; however, there is evidence that the variability of the conditional variance implied by the EGARCH is too high.

Since 1973 technological, political, regulatory, and economic forces have been changing the worldwide economy in a fashion comparable to the changes experienced during the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution. As in the nineteenth century, we are experiencing declining costs, increasing average (but decreasing marginal) productivity of labor, reduced growth rates of labor income, excess capacity, and the requirement for downsizing and exit. The last two decades indicate corporate internal control systems have failed to deal effectively with these changes, especially slow growth and the requirement for exit. The next several decades pose a major challenge for Western firms and political systems as these forces continue to work their way through the worldwide economy.

For New York Stock Exchange listed securities, the price execution of seemingly comparable orders differs systematically by location. In general, executions at the Cincinnati, Midwest, and New York stock exchanges are most favorable to trade initiators, while executions at the National Association of Security Dealers are least favorable. These intermarket price differences depend on trade size, with the smallest trades exhibiting the biggest per share price difference. Collectively, these results raise questions about the adequacy of the existing intermarket quote system, the broker's fiduciary responsibility for 'best execution,'and the propriety of order flow inducements.

The authors analyze how ownership concentration affects firm value and control of public companies by examining effects of deaths of inside blockholders. They find shareholder wealth increases, ownership concentration falls, and extensive corporate control activity ensues. Share price responses are related to the deceased's equity stake. Control group holdings fall for two-thirds of the firms due to either the estate's dispersal or inheritors selling stock. A majority of firms become targets of control bids: three-quarters of bids are successful; one-third are hostile. The authors' evidence is broadly consistent with Stulz's (1988) model of the relationship between ownership concentration and firm value.

This paper documents that strategies that buy stocks that have performed well in the past and sell stocks that hav e performed poorly in the past generate significant positive returns o ver three- to twelve-month holding periods. The authors find that the profitability of these strategies are not due to their systematic risk or to delay ed stock price reactions to common factors. However, part of the abnorm al returns generated in the first year after portfolio formation dissipates in the following two years. A similar pattern of returns around the earnings announcements of past winners and losers is also documented.