Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines the valuation impacts of specially designated dividends (SDDs) by analyzing the behavior of stock and bond prices on dates surrounding their announcements. The evidence presented here suggests that SDDs are considered positive signals by the market, with (most of) the gains associated with their announcements accruing to stockholders. In addition, we present some evidence that the gain to stockholders is negatively related to the frequency of SDD announcements.

Dissatisfaction occasionally has been expressed with traditional measures of duration for immunization on conceptual grounds. However, more elegant duration measures have not been found to be superior to the traditional ones in empirical tests of immunization efficacy. Under the assumption that the term structure of continuously compounded interest rates can be expressed as a polynomial, Chambers and Carleton (1981) demonstrate that the finite and noninstantaneous return of a default-free bond can be expressed as a vector product of a duration vector and a shift vector. This study derives immunization strategies from the model and tests them. The results of the portfolio tests indicate that the traditional duration approach of Macaulay provides enhanced immunization relative to maturity approaches or naive approaches. However, the duration vector approach produces further improvements.

Ronald W. Masulis, Brett Trueman, Corporate Investment and Dividend Decisions under Differential Personal Taxation, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 369-385

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the optimal individual behavior in acquiring information and to determine the amount of information incorporated in a stock at equilibrium, in the presence of a cost schedule in acquiring information. Our paper shows that at equilibrium the cost to acquire information that is not already incorporated in the price depends only on the representative investor's risk preferences. It follows that the marginal information costs are the same across all stocks at equilibrium even though the stock's information costs schedules may differ. This suggests that the prices of small stocks may not incorporate all publicly available information. This paper also provides empirical evidence that newspapers' publication of publicly available information can affect the stock prices.

This study explores the hypothesis that capital structure change provides bidders and targets a motive for merger. After a brief review of theories that would support the hypothesis, the paper reports results of tests on (1) leverage in bidder and target firms, and (2) change in shareholder wealth associated with change in leverage. The findings support the theory of Myers and Majluf that “slack-rich” bidders pair with “slack-poor” targets to create value. These results are contrary to other studies, which find highly levered bidders.

This paper presents a generalized version of the lattice approach to pricing options. It shows how the control variate technique can produce significant improvements in the efficiency of the approach. The control variate technique is illustrated using American puts on dividend and nondividend paying stocks.

Robert A. Haugen, Lemma W. Senbet, Bankruptcy and Agency Costs: Their Significance to the Theory of Optimal Capital Structure, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 27-38

In a world of asymmetric information in which only the insiders know the quality of the firm, it is claimed that debt, even if it is risky, is more advantageous than outside equity because issuance of debt is less attractive to inferior firms. The advantage to debt arises from the fact that it can keep unprofitable firms out of the market, thus improving the average quality of firms in the market. This advantage exists even if the firms cannot be perfectly sorted in the signaling equilibrium.

This paper extends the Roll model for implicit bid-ask spreads by incorporating the possibility of serial correlation in transaction type. The validity of this formula is examined using intra-day transactions and bid-ask spread data for options traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The results indicate that the model derived here closely estimates the effective bid-ask spread in that it explains more than 80 percent of the crosssectional differences in announced bid-ask spreads.

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.