Mechanical trading rules seem to have more potential than previous tests found. Fama and Blume (1966), looking at the Dow 30 of the late 1950s, found no profits for the best (½-percent) rule after adjusting for transactions costs. Fifteen of these stocks looked profitable in their sample, however; for the same rule, the surviving fourteen show statistically significant profits for 1970–1982 for transactions costs obtainable by floor traders. The test used here assumes constant risk premia, or more generally, that risk premia are on average approximately the same on days “in” as for the total period.

This paper models the unobservable rate of return on money balances (r) as depending directly on the transactions velocity of money (ν). Approximating this relationship linearly, the efficient markets hyphothesis (EMH) is shown to imply that first differences of the log of ν should either be random or should show negative first-order serial correlation at most. The empirical evidence presented below is consistent with the EMH.

In the analysis of problems of choice under uncertainty, many results depend on the investigator's ability to determine the signs of certain integrals. A recently derived method of doing this—christened the “covariance method” by Batra [2]—demonstrates that, in certain cases, recognition of the fact that the integrals involved are composed of covariance terms can provide a simple and elegant solution to the problem. This paper uses a simple portfolio model to demonstrate that these covariance terms can be exploited to obtain other useful results as well.

Professors Sorensen and Hawkins (hereafter SH) have utilized regression analysis to examine the pricing of preferred stocks both before and after a particular event. This event, the NAIC event, occurred in 1979 when the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) adopted a rule permitting insurance companies to carry sinking fund preferred issues at book value rather than at the market value required before. SH results indicate nine to 12 variables have a significant effect on the pricing of preferred stock.

Kenneth J. Arrow, Real and Nominal Magnitudes in Economics, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 15, No. 4, Proceedings of 15th Annual Conference of the Western Finance Association, June 19-21, 1980, San Diego, California (Nov., 1980), pp. 773-783

This paper is concerned with empirical measurement, analysis, and comparison of the returns expected by investors in U. S., German, French and Japanese equity markets. The expedited return to equity is a pivotal concept in capital market theory because of the concern of this theory with analyzing relationships between expected returns to the general market and expected returns to individual securities. Because the expected equity returns are not directly observable, the approach almost uniformly taken in the empirical testing of capital market theory is to make additional behavioral assumptions beyond those contained in the basic theory that enable it to be translated into an analysis of market relationships among ex-post returns. Empirical tests then become tests of both the basic theory and the appended assumptions. A new approach to the empirical testing of capital market relationships is to develop empirical approximations to the returns expected in the equity market, and to employ these expectational measures to directly test capital market relationships. This paper formulates and examines this approach. Empirical approximations of the expected equity return for a representative group of major international stock exchanges are formulated, estimated, and analyzed, leading to a direct test of the International Asset Pricing model in its original form.

Allen J. Michel, Municipal Bond Ratings: A Discriminant Analysis Approach, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 12, No. 4, Proceedings of the 1977 Western Finance Association Meeting (Nov., 1977), pp. 587-598

Define Rt as the ratio of the value of an asset at the end of the tthperiod to its value at the end of the previous period. Rt is then a one-period relative equal to unity plus the interest rate. Assume that Rt is an independent, normally distributed random variable with mean μ and nonzero variance σ2. Rt is then observed aswhere the disturbance term ∈t t is independently and normally distributed with mean zero and variance σ2. To assess the long-term expected rate of return of the asset, it is desirable to estimate its expected increment in value of the one-period relative raised to the Nth power, i.e., μN.

As an alteration of the firm's productive asset portfolio, divestiture is the mirror-image of asset acquisition or merger. Yet, though significant efforts have been expended by researchers into the implications of acquisition and merger, the literature of finance is all but silent on the subject of divestiture.

In Gonedes [5], the results of an empirical analysis of accounting-based and market-based estimates of systematic risk were presented. These results suggested that there is, in general, a “statistically significant” relationship between accounting-based and market-based estimates of systematic risk at the level of individual securities, if the accounting-based estimates are conditional upon first-differences or scaled first-differences of the accounting numbers. The differencing transformation seemed to induce relatively better specified models for the accounting numbers.