Knowledge that Transforms

We investigate the impact of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on the relative pricing of U.S. Treasury bonds. We obtain positive statistically and economically significant estimates for the implicit tax rates of a “representative” investor in the late 1970s and early 1980s. After the 1986 Tax Reform, the point estimates for the tax rate are close to zero. Tests for a regime shift associated with the 1986 Tax Reform support the hypothesis that this event largely eliminated tax effects from the term structure. We discuss both institutional and statutory explanations for this change.

(NOTE: Each chapter concludes with a Summary, Suggestions for Further Reading, Problems and Questions, and Appendices.) I. ANALYSIS OF INDIVIDUAL SECURITIES. 1. Fixed Income Security Prices and Yields. 2. Option-Free Bonds: Measuring and Managing Interest Rate Risk. 3. The Term Structure of Interest Rates. 4. Equities: The Discounted Cash Flow Approach. 5. Principles of Option Pricing. 6. Fixed Income Securities with Call and Prepayment Options. 7. Other Options Embedded in Bonds and Equity. 8. Forward and Futures Contracts. II. ANALYSIS OF PORTFOLIOS OF SECURITIES. 9. Investor Preferences and Attitudes Toward Risk. 10. Fundamentals of Portfolio Analysis: The Generic Portfolio Problems. 11. Capital Market Equilibrium and the Pricing of Securities. 12. Active Portfolio Strategies. 13. Performance Evaluation and the Organization of Portfolio Management. Index.

We conduct a unique test of adverse selection in the equity issuance process. While common stock is the dominant means of payment in bank mergers, stock acquisition agreements provide target shareholders with varying degrees of protection against adverse price movements in the bidder's stock between the time of the merger agreement and the time of merger completion. We show that it is the degree of protection against adverse price changes and not the percent of stock offered in a bank merger that explains bidder merger announcement abnormal returns. This result is difficult to explain outside of an adverse selection framework.

This article investigates the behavior of the term structure of interest rates over the business cycle. In contrast to prior studies that measure the business cycle by the simple growth in aggregate economic activity, we consider the deviation of aggregate economic activity from its potentially stochastic trend. We show that incorporating both an independent trend and cyclical component in consumption improves the efficiency in estimating consumption‐based asset pricing models. We also find that the term spread is more informative about future changes in stochastically detrended real gross domestic product (GDP) than future growth rates in real GDP.

This article examines possible explanations for “winner-loser reversals” in the national stock market indices of 16 countries. There is no evidence that loser countries are riskier than winner countries either in terms of standard deviations, covariance with the world market or other risk factors, or performance in adverse economic states of the world. While there is evidence that small markets are subject to larger reversals than large markets, perhaps due to some form of market imperfection, the reversals are not only a small-market phenomenon. The apparent anomaly of winner-loser reversals in national market indices therefore remains unresolved.

This article develops a game-theoretic model to analyze market makers' intertemporal pricing strategies. We show that dealers who adopt noncooperative pricing strategies may set bid-ask spreads above competitive levels. This form of “implicit collusion” differs from explicit collusion, where dealers cooperate to fix prices. Price discreteness or asymmetric information are not required for collusion to occur. Rather, institutional arrangements that restrict access to the order flow are important determinants of the ability to collude because they reduce dealers' incentives to compete on price. Public policy efforts to increase interdealer competition should focus on such restrictions.

We examine 47 stocks that voluntarily left the American Stock Exchange from 1992 through 1995 and listed on the Nasdaq. We find that both effective and quoted spreads increase by about 100 percent after listing on the Nasdaq. These spread changes are consistent across stocks. In contrast, excess returns are positive when firms announce a switch from The American Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq. We are unable to explain this apparent contradiction.

Amihud and Mendelson (1986) and Constantinides (1986) provide a theoretical basis for the proposition that assets with higher transactions costs are held by investors for longer holding periods, and vice versa. We examine average holding periods and bid-ask spreads for Nasdaq stocks from 1983 through 1991 and for New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) stocks from 1975 through 1989 and find strong evidence that, as predicted, the length of investors' holding periods is related to bid-ask spreads. We also find that the relation between holding periods and bid-ask spreads is much stronger on Nasdaq, where spreads are larger, than on the NYSE, where spreads are smaller.

The higher taxation of dividends in the United States gave rise to theories that explain why companies pay dividends. Tax-based signaling models propose that the higher tax on dividends is a necessary condition to make them informative about companies' values. In Germany, where dividends are not tax-disadvantaged and in fact are taxed lower for most investor classes, these models predict that dividends are not informative. However, we find that the stock price reaction to dividend news in Germany is similar to that found in the United States. This suggests other reasons, beyond taxation, that make dividends informative.