Knowledge that Transforms

We have discussed some of the effects of rate regulation in the property and casualty insurance industry. One consequence of the regulatory environment is that an optimal capital structure may clearly exist in this industry. If the rate of return to the insureds is generally deficient, we would expect that property and casualty stock companies would have an incentive to lever themselves to the maximum extent permissible by selling insurance. The classic monopoly of the economic literature finances its lucrative investment opportunities in a competitive capital market. The stock insurance company invests in that market, but the relative distribution of the return earned there may be less than equitable due to the process and standards of rate regulation.

This paper has discussed the importance of stationary data in statistical applications and has at the same time suggested one method for testing for stationarity. An application of the testing procedure is made to common stock prices. The results indicate that these data could be nonstationary in the usual sense of stability of the mean and mean-square values despite efforts to transform the data into a stationary form using first differences.

Efficiency analysis is concerned with isolating the efficient subset of investments (portfolios) for all investors belonging to a specified group. In order to construct a meaningful efficiency criterion, i.e., one which holds for more than one investor, care must be exercised to ensure that the investors' efficient set is independent of their wealth.

This paper presents the results of a study which sought to determine whether the status of large member banks as owner-controlled or management-controlled has borne a significant relation to bank profit rates during recent years. The impetus for the study was provided by the view, encountered frequently in the literature, that management-controlled firms may place less emphasis on profit rate than owner-controlled firms, sacrificing it for performance goals regarded as more consistent with management interest. W. Baumo.1 [1, p. 4 and pp. 101–104], for example, has argued that management-controlled firms may sacrifice profit rate in order to achieve higher growth rate and reduced risk acceptance. R. Monsen and A. Downs [11] suggest that such firms may sacrifice both profit rate and growth rate for reduced risk acceptance. K. Cohen and S. Reid, in their study of bank merger activity during 1952–1961 [5], argue that bank managers, as compared to bank owners, place more emphasis on growth rate and less emphasis on profit-associated variables. Other possibilities present themselves. Management-controlled firms may sacrifice profit rate directly for management salaries, bonuses, and fringe benefits, including benefits associated with management prestige. The management-controlled firms may simply pursue efficiency less vigorously.

It is well known that present institutional arrangements do not permit investors to use the proceeds of short sales to finance the purchase of other stocks. On the contrary, investors must place the proceeds of short sales in escrow, and they must also affirmatively invest (deposit) an additional amount equal to margin requirements (which may be as much as 100 percent) of the “proceeds” of the short sales. These escrowing and depositing requirements together will be referred to as “short-sales escrowing requirements.” These escrowing requirements not only involve forced or “by-product” holdings of the (nominally) riskless asset, they also change the structure of the investor's wealth constraint by requiring the substitution of absolute values for the natural number of shares when short sales are made.

When measures such as the average or the midrange are used to report a typical value for the price series in each interval, the stochastic character of the underlying price process is subtly transformed. Fortunately, the spurious serial dependence introduced by averaging measures is sufficiently well understood to allow direct tests of many hypotheses to be made from averaged data. Moreover, a simple autoregressive transformation of the averaged data can be used to unscramble the effects of averaging on the lower-frequency components of the spectrum of the underlying process. These statistical devices are presented and are then illustrated by applications to the Cowles Commission Common- Stock Indexes, a massive collection of New York Stock Exchange price indexes tabulated in the form of monthly midranges.

This paper has shown that the models developed to select common stock port-folios can be adapted to the selection of real estate portfolios and mixed asset portfolios. The concepts are all identical, and as long as return and risk can be quantified, the problems are soluble.The portfolios identified using a small sample indicate that real estate portfolios can have more return and less risk than do common stock portfolios. When the two assets are combined, the real estate assets dominate the resultant portfolios. On an after-tax basis these results are more apparent. The local aspect of real estate versus the national aspect of common stocks is primarily responsible for these results.

The approach of selecting a portfolio of stocks on the basis of expected return and variance was introduced by Markowitz [18] in 1952 and subsequently was more fully developed by him [19] in 1959. Since this time, there has been considerable research either directly concerned with, or related to, the Markowitz model. The utility implications of his assumption that an investor chooses a portfolio solely on the basis of expected return and variance (where variance is identified with risk) have been studied, [1], [A], [22], and [31]. A simplified method of solving for the efficient set of portfolios under the assumption of a regression structure has been developed by Sharpe [26], and approximation methods have been suggested [25] and [29]. Empirical tests (with partially contradictory conclusions) of portfolio selection theory are described in [5], [7], [8], [20], and [27]. Studies of economic questions (such as liquidity preference, equilibrium stock prices, substitutability of risky assets, etc.), as formulated within the portfolio model, can be found in [10], [11], [13], [14], [16], [23], and [28]. A related portfolio selection approach, based on the assumption of a Pareto underlying distribution, has been suggested by Fama [6]. A modification by Baumol [2] introduced a confidence limit criterion. Also, some initial attempts have been made at deriving related adaptive models of portfolio selection, [21], [30].

Recent studies of mutual funds have all arrived at the same conclusion: mutual fund performance has been inferior to the performance of the market indices. One of the most prominent of these studies was conducted by William F. Sharpe. He showed that if his measure of mutual fund performance, the reward-to-variability ratio, is calculated net of management expenses for each fund in his sample of thirty-four, then the average value of this ratio over the thirty-four funds is significantly less than the same measure applied to the Dow Jones Industrials over the 1954–1963 period. From this evidence, Sharpe concluded that average mutual fund performance was distinctly inferior to an investment in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It is the intent of this paper to show that if another variable, namely the third moment of the fund's annual rate of return, is introduced into the investor's decision process, Sharpe's conclusion must be altered.

The Capital Asset Pricing Model of Sharpe [10, 1964], Lintner [8, 1965], and Mossin [9, 1966] showed how it was possible to derive under fairly stringent assumptions the conditions for equilibrium in a market for risky assets. Recent work has been directed at relaxing these assumptions, and this paper extends the progress made thus far by deriving some properties of capital market equilibrium when investors are faced with divergent borrowing and lending rates and when these rates may vary among investors.