I investigate changes in operating performance after 58 management buyouts of public companies completed during 1977–1986. Operating returns increase significantly from the year before to the year after buyouts as measured by operating cash flows (before interest and taxes) per employee and per dollar of operating assets. Subsequent changes in operating returns suggest that this increase is sustained. Adjustments in the management of working capital contribute to the increase in operating returns. The increase is not, however, the result of layoffs or reductions in expenditures for advertising, maintenance and repairs, research and development, or property, plant, and equipment.

This paper reviews the theory and evidence on the process by which corporations raise debt and equity capital and the associated effects on security prices. Findings from related transactions are used to test hypotheses about the stock price patterns accompanying announcements of security offerings. Various contractual alternatives employed in security issues are examined; for example, rights or underwritten offers, negotiated or competitive bid, best efforts or firm commitment contracts, and shelf or traditional registration. Finally, incentives for underpricing new issues are analyzed.

This paper provides an analysis of the choice of method for raising additional equity capital by listed firms. Examination of expenses reported to the SEC indicates that rights offerings involve significantly lower costs; yet underwriter are employed in over 90 percent of the offerings. The underwriting industry, finance textbooks, and corporate proxy statements offer several justifications for the use of underwriters. However, estimates of the magnitudes of these arguments indicate that they are insufficient to justify the additional costs of the use of underwriters. The use of underwriters thus appears to be inconsistent with rational, wealth-maximizing behavior by the owners of the firm. The paper concludes with an examination of alternate explanations of the observed choice of financing method.

Recent advances in the general equilibrium pricing of simple put and call options lay the foundation for the development of a general theory of the valuation of contingent claims assets. This paper provides a review of: (1) the development of the general equilibrium option pricing model by Black and Scholes, and the subsequent modifications of this model by Merton and others; (2) the empirical verification of these models; and (3) applications of these models to value other contingent claim assets such as the debt and equity of a levered firm and dual purpose mutual funds.

This study examines how political and economic factors affect the offer price, share allocation, and other terms governments choose when they privatize state-owned enterprises via a public share offering. Using a 59 country sample of 630 share issue privatizations (SIPs) with total proceeds of over $446 billion during the period 1977–1997, we find that governments consistently underprice SIP offers, tilt their share allocation patterns to favour domestic investors, impose control restrictions on privatized firms, and typically use fixed-price offers rather than book building or competitive tender offers, all to further political and economic policy objectives.

This paper proposes an alternative to the asymptotic principal components procedure of Connor and Korajczyk (J. Financial Econom. 15 (1986) 373) that is robust to time series heteroskedasticity in the factor model residuals. The new method is simple to use and requires no assumptions stronger than those made by Connor and Korajczyk. It is demonstrated through simulations and analysis of actual stock market data that allowing heteroskedasticity sometimes improves the quality of the extracted factors quite dramatically. Over the period from 1989 to 1993, for example, a single factor extracted using the Connor and Korajczyk method explains only 8.2% of the variation of the CRSP value-weighted index, while the factor extracted allowing heteroskedasticity explains 57.3%. Accounting for heteroskedasticity is also important for tests of the APT, with p-values sometimes depending strongly on the factor extraction method used.

Consistent with an information-signaling perspective, negative and statistically significant announcement effects are associated with bank loan-loss reserve (LLR) announcements over the 1985–1990 period. Announcement effects differ between money-center and regional banks and also according to the nature of contemporaneous earnings and dividend disclosures. Moreover Information transfer or ‘contagion’ effects are present in that LLR announcements by regional banks decrease the value of both money-center banks and nonannouncing regional banks. These statistically significant contagion effects suggest a link between the asset quality characteristics of money-center and regional bank loan portfolios.

This paper reconciles the relative pricing controversy between DeBondt and Thaler (1985, 1987), Chan (1988), and Ball and Kothari (1989). The negative autocorrelation in long-horizon index returns, along with the selection criterion of the contrarian strategy, can explain the positive covariance between time-varying betas and risk premiums. However, test-period beta estimates reflect the reversal of earnings expectations associated with underlying factors. The controversy thus reduces to the debate of Fama and French (1988) and Poterba and Summers (1988) over the source of the temporary price components in the market index. Rational changes in expected returns and cash flows explain most of the cross-sectional variation in returns.

Arbitrage pricing theorems are derived for options on stocks with jumps as a well as local movements. The resulting valuation formulas depend on observable variables only. Closed-form valuation expressions are obtained in the case of large positive and negative jumps. These results translate into a simple algebra for characterizing the risk of arbitrage and investment portfolios. A continuous-time formulation of the infinite variance hypothesis leads to isomorphic pricing expressions.