Knowledge that Transforms

Survey data on interest rate expectations permit separate testing of the two alternative hypotheses in traditional term structure tests: that the expectations hypothesis fails, and that expected future interest rates are ex post inefficient forecasts. We find that the source of the spread's poor predictions of future interest rates varies with maturity. At short maturities the expectations hypothesis fails. At long maturities, however, changes in the yield curve reflect changes in expected future rates one-for-one, an implication of the expectations hypothesis. This result confirms earlier findings that long rates underreact to short rates, but now it cannot be attributed to term premia.

This paper finds that the generally favorable assessment of corporate sell-off decisions is most apparent for closely held firms where insider net-buy activity is prevalent during the prior six-month period. This suggests that insider trader activity and ownership structure information are used by the market in the characterization of sell-off decisions as favorable or unfavorable for investors.

The comovements in real stock prices between the U.K. and the U.S. appear to be too large to be accounted for in terms of the comovements of real dividends between the countries even after consideration of the possibility of information pooling. When consideration is made of the comovements of real interest rates between the countries, there is weaker evidence of excess comovement of price.

This paper examines the turn-of-the-year effect, the firm size effect, and the relation between these two effects for a sample of OTC stocks traded via the NASDAQ reporting system over the period 1973–1985. We find results similar to those based solely on listed stocks. The importance of these findings stems from the existence of nontrivial differences between the characteristics of the OTC/NASDAQ sample and the samples of listed firms examined previously in the literature. We also find that NASDAQ quoted bid-ask spreads are highly negatively correlated with firm size, are not highly seasonal, and are large enough to preclude trading profits based upon a knowledge of the seasonality of small firms' returns.

We compare different indexation schemes in terms of their ability to facilitate forgiveness and reduce the investment disincentives associated with the large LDC debt overhang. Indexing to an endogenous variable (e.g., a country's output) has a negative moral hazard effect on investment. This problem does not arise when payments are linked to an exogenous variable such as commodity prices. Nonetheless, indexing payments to output may be useful when debtors know more about their willingness to invest than lenders. We also reach new conclusions about the desirability of default penalties under asymmetric information.