International capital market equilibrium is characterized for a world economy in which consumption preferences are defined multiplicatively over many commodities. It is shown that the set of relative asset prices under pure exchange in international capital markets depends on the real purchasing power of nominal payoffs under uncertainty and does not depend on the currency in which the nominal payoffs are denominated. A Sharpe-Lintner type international capital asset pricing model is derived as a special case. Proportional ad valorem commodity taxes and transportation costs are incorporated in the valuation model, interest rate parity and purchasing power parity are reinterpreted under uncertainty, and international differences in borrowing and lending are shown to reflect, in part, differences in risk aversion across countries.

In this paper we present evidence on the existence of seasonality in monthly rates of return on the New York Stock Exchange from 1904–1974. With the exception of the 1929–1940 period, there are statistically significant differences in mean returns among months due primarily to large January returns. Dispersion measures reveal no consistent seasonal patterns and the characteristic exponent seems invariant among months. We also explore possible implications of the observed seasonality for the capital asset pricing model and other research

In this paper a combined capital asset pricing model and option pricing model is considered and then applied to the derivation of equity's value and its systematic risk. In the first section we develop the two models and present some newly found properties of the option pricing model. The second section is concerned with the effects of these properties on the securityholders of firms with less than perfect ‘me first’ rules. We show how unanticipated changes in firm capital and asset structures can differentially affect the firm's debt and equity. In the final section of the paper we consider a number of theoretical and empirical implications of the joint model. These include investment policy as well as the causes and effects of non-stationarity in the systematic risk of levered equity and risky debt

This paper examines the structure of option valuation problems and develops a new technique for their solution. It also introduces several jump and diffusion processes which have not been used in previous models. The technique is applied to these processes to find explicit option valuation formulas, and solutions to some previously unsolved problems involving the pricing of securities with payouts and potential bankruptcy

What policy should a corporation adopt concerning the funding of a defined-benefit pension plan and the investment of the assets held in trust for the plan? Until recently, pension plans did not have to be insured, and some risk could be borne by intended beneficiaries. Federal legislation has now mandated such coverage. This paper analyzes corporate policy under three conditions which correspond, roughly, to the earlier situation (‘uninsure’ loans), the current situation (‘partially insured’ loans), and the situation required by law to be implemented in the future (‘completely insured’ plans). We show that if insurance premiums are set correctly, corporate policy in this area may not matter; otherwise the optimal policy may simply be that which maximizes the difference between the value of the insurance and its cost

Numerical approximations are presented for the expected utility of wealth over a single time period for a small investor who proportions her or his available capital between a risk-free asset and a risky stock. The stock price is assumed to be a log-stable random variable. The utility functional is logarithmic or isoeleastic (yaq, q extless 0). Analytic results are presented for special choices of model parameters, and for large and small time periods.