Knowledge that Transforms

[A number of portfolio strategies followed by practitioners are dominated because they are incompletely diversified over time. The payoff distribution pricing model is used to compute the cost of following undiversified strategies. Simple numerical examples illustrate the technique, and computer-generated examples provide realistic estimates of the cost of some typical policies, using reasonable parameter values. The cost can be substantial and should not be ignored by practitioners. A section on generalizations shows how to extend the analysis to term structure models and other general models of returns.]

[This article develops a theory in which concentrated-trading patterns arise endogenously as a result of the strategic behavior of liquidity traders and informed traders. Our results provide a partial explanation for some of the recent empirical findings concerning the patterns of volume and price variability in intraday transaction data.]

[How should new securities be designed? Traditional theories have little to say on this: the literature on capital structure and general equilibrium theories with incomplete markets takes the securities firms issue as exogenous. This article explicitly incorporates the transaction costs of issuing securities and develops a model in which the instruments that are traded are chosen optimally and the economy's market structure is endogenous. Among other things, it is shown that the firm's income stream should be split so that in every state all payoffs are allocated to the security held by the group that values it most.]

[We examine the sale of equity within the context of a model of negotiation between a firm and a less well informed purchaser. We introduce a simple form of negotiation by allowing the firm to set the price of the issue and by assuming that the purchaser is a financier-underwriter who acts strategically. This transaction is analyzed as a noncooperative game, and we identify sequential equilibria that are consistent with observed behavior: namely, that negotiations occasionally fail, that market reactions to equity offers are not uniformly negative, and that equity placements are often underpriced.]

[In this article we model the financing decisions of a firm as a sequential signaling game. We prove that, when insiders have perfect information regarding the firm's future cash flows, the application of "refinements" to the set of admissible equilibria leads to the dominance of debt over equity financing. However, we show that when insiders observe the firm's cash flows imperfectly, there may exist sequential equilibria in which this "pecking order" breaks down and some firms strictly prefer equity to debt financing. We also prove that, despite the breakdown of the pecking order, the announcement effect of equity financing will be negative relative to debt financing.]

[The role of ordinary options in facilitating the completion of securities markets is examined in the context of a model of contingent claims sufficiently general to accommodate the continuous distributions of asset pricing theory and option pricing theory. In this context, it is shown that call options written on a single security approximately span all contingent claims written on this security and that call options written on portfolios of call options on individual primitive securities approximately span all contingent claims that can be written on these primitive securities. In the case of simple options, explicit formulas are given for the approximating options and portfolios of options. These results are applied to the pricing of contingent claims by arbitrage and to irrelevance propositions in corporate finance.]

[A dividend-ratio model is introduced here that makes the log of the dividend-price ratio on a stock linear in optimally forecast future one-period real discount rates and future one-period growth rates of real dividends. If ex post discount rates are observable, this model can be tested by using vector autoregressive methods. Four versions of the linearized model, differing in the measure of discount rates, are tested for U.S. time series 1871-1986 and 1926-1986: a version that imposes constant real discount rates, and versions that measure discount rates from real interest rate data, aggregate real consumption data, and return variance data. The results yield a metric to judge the relative importance of real dividend growth, measured real discount rates, and unexplained factors in determining the dividend-price ratio.]

[While most takeover models assume atomistic stockholders, we analyze a single-raider model with finitely many stockholders. Because the raider can always make some stockholders pivotal, he can overcome the free-rider problem identified by Grossman and Hart (1980) and others in atomistic-stockholder models and profitably take over even without exclusion. One might expect that it would be harder for the raider to make stockholders of more widely held firms pivotal and that exclusion would thus become necessary; however, the infinite-stockholder game cannot yield this conclusion. We also consider the limit of the finite-stockholder game and give conditions under which exclusion is unnecessary. Finally, we show that exclusion leads to the possibility of inefficient takeovers.]

[This article investigates the structure on preferences required to derive Ross's arbitrage pricing theory (APT). It is shown that only ordinal preferences are required. In particular, the APT does not require that agents possess preferences representable as risk-averse expected utility functions. This characteristic of the APT is not shared by the standard equilibrium-based capital asset pricing models.]