George Kaufman and Cynthia Latta in “The Demand for Money: Preliminary Evidence from Industrial Countries, ” have presented econometric evidence that the money-demand function may shift with the development of financial markets. The thesis depends on the heightened cross-elasticities and lowered wealth-elasticities (or income-elasticities) that are supposed to attend the development of new near-money forms. Their evidence is based on a summary of statistics from money-demand equations for developed and less-developed countries.

This paper is concerned with the validity of the conventional t tests on regression coefficients when there is serious multicollinearity between the explanatory variables. It is well known that increasing multicollinearity causes the true standard errors of regression coefficients to rise. The crucial question, however, is whether the conventional formulas will in practice reflect this rise. The purpose of this note is to show that the conventional t tests will in practice reflect this rise. But this note also points out the danger involved in mechanically dropping variables from multiple regression equations by t tests because t values of the regression coefficients may not be significantly different from zero when the true (population) values of these coefficients are in fact not zero, if the explanatory variables are highly intercorrelated.

The dividend decision is a residual corporate decision and yet it is not a residual corporate decision. This theme runs through Professor Higgins' paper. It is based on the one hand on Higgins' belief that other decisions are more important and should take precedence over the dividend decision, and on the other, that the dividend decision is a function of these more important decisions. If dividends were truly residual, they would be explained by the corporate budget identity. In the empirical analysis, however, dividends are a function of other balance sheet decisions. In this sense the decision is neither active nor residual but passive. The reader wonders why the author insists on this role for dividends when interdependency in decision making is the more appealing (and inevitable) framework.

The pros and cons of bank mergers and multiple-office banking are in the forefront of bank policy consideration today [8, p. 19] Commercial banks have Joined the industrial and merchandising files., as well as the transportation companies, to sweil a rising tide of merger; The Comptroller of the Currency has reported that nearly 2, 000 banks with resources of over $40 billion, were acquired by other banks between 1950 and 1962, inclusive, [47, p. ll].

The boom stock market is a well known phenomenon of our time. The investor (and public) interest in the market, however, does not seem to be shared by the monetary policy makers. Certainly, if we use the 1920's as the benchmark, the Federal Reserveexhibits considerably less anxiety over the present boom market than it did then.

We find the financial condition of states impacts bank credit supply through their municipal bond holdings. In particular, we treat sudden political and statutory actions during the 2011 union bargaining rights debates in Wisconsin and Ohio as exogenous shocks to state solvency. We show bank valuations and municipal bond spreads adjust to the announcements, and, over longer horizons, a new lending channel linked to state solvency emerges, whereby banks supply credit as municipal bond appreciations free up capital.

Kalman J. Cohen, Steven F. Maier, Robert A. Schwartz, David K. Whitcomb, Market Makers and the Market Spread: A Review of Recent Literature, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 14, No. 4, Proceedings of 14th Annual Conference of the Western Finance Association, June 21-23, 1979 (Nov., 1979), pp. 813-814+816-835