Thomas E. Copeland, A Probability Model of Asset Trading, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 12, No. 4, Proceedings of the 1977 Western Finance Association Meeting (Nov., 1977), pp. 563-578

An important maintained hypothesis in financial economics states that the average interest rate on a firm's debt is positively related to its leverage. This hypothesis has a long history going back at least to the work of Kalecki [4] where it was used to derive a determinate size for the competitive firm when the production function is homogeneous of degree one. The upward sloping interest rate-leverage relationship has also played an important role in the theory of finance. In this connection, it is somewhat interesting to find both Modigliani-Miller [5] and their many critics in complete agreement on the nature of this relationship. In particular, their statement on this subject conveys the impression that this relationship is governed by an unalterable law when they write: “Economic theory and market experience both suggest that the yields demanded by lenders tend to increase with the debt-equity ratio of the borrowing firm” [5, p. 273].

In [1, p. 999] I wrongly stated that “the solution locus generated by the chance-constrained problem is efficient (for the class of utility function implied by the expected wealth-probability of ruin criterion) if the assets follow a multinomial distribution with means above the survival level.” In support of this statement footnote 6 of [1] attempted to establish the quasiconcavity of the expected utility functionin the (μ, σ) plane, where F is the normal distribution, z = (s-μ)/σ

J. L. Sharma, Robert E. Kennedy, A Comparative Analysis of Stock Price Behavior on the Bombay, London, and New York Stock Exchanges, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Sep., 1977), pp. 391-413

This paper examines the stationarity of beta coefficients, especially in regard to recent, major stock market trends. In addition to the usual correlation tests for stationarity, this paper describes a more direct method for testing the stationarity of portfolio betas. The method involves the use of paired t-tests which show separately the degree of stationarity for each portfolio beta. In the process of testing for stationarity, the portfolio betas also are adjusted for measurement error using a formulation suggested by Blume [3].

Richard Kolodny, Peter Seeley, Murray E. Polakoff, The Effect of Compensating Balance Requirements on the Profitability of Borrowers and Lenders, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 12, No. 5 (Dec., 1977), pp. 801-815

A stock purchase warrant gives the owner the option to buy some predetermined number of shares of the associated common stock at a specified price over a stipulated time period. The specified price is called the exercise price of the warrant. The stipulated time period is quite variable, though the life of a typical warrant will exceed five years.