Knowledge that Transforms

Ezequiel L. Machado, Willard T. Carleton, Financial Planning in a Regulated Environment, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 13, No. 4, Proceedings of Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Western Finance Association, June 20-26, 1978 (Nov., 1978), pp. 759-777

The recent world-wide increase in consumer prices has created an intense interest in inflation on the part of both the academic and the financial communities. For example, in his American Financial Association presidential address, Professor Lintner [4, p. 259] states “few matters are of more serious concern to students of finance and to members of the financial community than the impacts of inflation on our financial institutions and markets and its implication for investment policy.”

Paul H. Cootner, David H. Pyle, Capital Asset Pricing in a General Equilibrium Framework, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 13, No. 4, Proceedings of Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Western Finance Association, June 20-26, 1978 (Nov., 1978), pp. 613-624

Krouse and Lee [5] have formulated an optimal financing problem of a firm in the dynamic setting of optimal control theory. Specifically, the problem is to find a financing mix of retained earnings and external equity over time in a way that maximizes the present value of the entire future dividends stream accruing to the firm's initial stockholders subject to a given maximum allowable growth rate for the firm.

In an earlier note in this Journal Strangways and Yandle (S-Y) [2] reported the results of a series of statistical tests on the effects of state usury laws on housing starts in 1966. Using cross sectional analysis, they focused on both the absolute level of single family housing starts in 1966 and the change in housing starts from 1965 to 1966.

Richard C. Burgess, Bruce T. O'Dell, An Empirical Examination of Index Efficiency: Implications for Index Funds, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Mar., 1978), pp. 93-100

In this issue of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Beranek [2] has presented a clever but cumbersome analysis showing that, for a simple multiperiod situation, computing a project's net present worth by discounting its cash flows at particular “costs of capital” and accepting the project if that net present worth is positive is completely consistent with raising the net present wealth of stockholders, initial investment from whom provides partial funding for the project.

The bank financial management process involves assets, liabilities, and factors external to the bank and thus is multivariate. Because variables such as deposits, loans, or interest rates are often related with a time lag to another variable such as investments, the process is also dynamic. Although the research work of Aigner [1], Aigner and Bryan [2], Anderson and Burger [3], Bryan [6], Bryan and Carleton [7], Fraser and Rose [10], Hester and Pierce [13], and Melnik [14] has dealt with the multivariate aspect of the process, the consideration of dynamic properties in empirical work has been limited.

In a recent article appearing in this journal [2] Jonathan Ingersoll developed a normative multidimensional security pricing model for the individual investor in which he corrected errors in an earlier attempt by William Jean [3] [4] [5] at developing such a model. The purpose of this correction is to clarify and correct certain parts of Ingersoll's correction of Jean's work.

Recently, the appropriateness of the weighted average cost of capital for making decisions on capital structure and the selection of projects has been seriously questioned. Arditti [1] showed that when project lives were finite, the weighted average cost of capital was not appropriate for valuing the firm. Beranek [2] demonstrates that when the objective is shareholder wealth maximization, the appropriate discount rate for capital budgeting decisions for finite lived projects n > 1 is not the traditional weighted average cost of capital.