Knowledge that Transforms

[Futures contracts often include a variety of delivery options that allow participants flexibility in satisfying the contract. These options have the potential to broaden the appeal of the contract. However, if these options are valuable, they may reduce the hedging effectiveness of the contract. This article analyzes the GNMA CDR futures contract that appears to have failed because of flaws in the contract's design. For the first 6 years following its introduction, the contract attracted significant and increasing volume, but, subsequently, the volume declined to almost zero. Over the years during which the volume experienced its most dramatic decline, the Treasury-bond futures contract provided a better hedge for current coupon GNMA securities than did the GNMA CDR futures contract. And, over this same period, the value of the quality option embedded in the contract often exceeded 5 percent of the futures price and reached a level of 19 percent at one point. We interpret the evidence to indicate that the contract failed because the delivery options reduced the hedging effectiveness of the contract for current coupon mortgage securities.]

[This article presents a mean-variance framework for likelihood-ratio tests of asset pricing models. A pricing model is tested by examining the position of one or more reference portfolios in sample mean-standard-deviation space. Included are tests of both single-beta and multiple-beta relations, with or without a riskless asset, using either a general or a specific alternative hypothesis. Tests with a factor that is not a portfolio return are also included. The mean-variance framework is illustrated by testing the zero-beta CAPM, a two-beta pricing model, and the consumption-beta model.]

[Most models of financial structure embody an assumption about financial distress that causes debt to be costly to the issuing firm. This approach has been criticized on the grounds that the assumed costs could be avoided by a costless financial reorganization. In this article we show that despite the possibility of costless reorganization, it may be rational for firms to incur significant costs in the resolution of financial distress. The main assumptions that give rise to our results are the existence of asymmetric information and of judicial discretion that allows courts to impose a reorganization on the claimants of a firm.]

[Technical analysis, or the use of past prices to infer private information, has value in a model in which prices are not fully revealing and traders have rational conjectures about the relation between prices and signals. A two-period dynamic model of equilibrium is used to demonstrate that rational investors use historical prices in forming their demands and to illustrate the sensitivity of the value of technical analysis to changes in the values of the exogenous parameters.]

[When several investors with different risk aversions trade competitively in a capital market, the allocation of wealth fluctuates randomly among them and acts as a state variable against which each market participant will want to hedge. This hedging motive complicates the investors' portfolio choice and the equilibrium in the capital market. This article features two investors, with the same degree of impatience, one of them being logarithmic and the other having an isoelastic utility function. They face one risky constant-return-to-scale stationary production opportunity and they can borrow and lend to and from each other. The behaviors of the allocation of wealth and of the aggregate capital stock are characterized, along with the behavior of the rate of interest, the security market line, and the portfolio holdings.]

[Earnings and dividend announcements on Fridays are much more likely to contain reports of declines and to be associated with negative abnormal returns than those on other weekdays. While Friday reports elicit negative average returns for firms in all size classes, announcements by smaller firms have more negative returns associated with them on the following trading day, suggesting that they are more likely to release reports after close of trading or that prices adjust more slowly to the information in these reports. Nevertheless, a comparison of the average returns by weekday, with and without the Friday announcements, leads us to conclude that these announcements explain a surprisingly small proportion (3.4 percent) of the weekend effect.]

[We investigate several asset pricing models in an international setting. We use data on a large number of assets traded in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and France. The models together with the hypothesis of capital market integration imply testable restrictions on multivariate regressions relating asset returns to various benchmark portfolios. We find that multifactor models tend to outperform single-index models in both domestic and international forms especially in their ability to explain seasonality in asset returns. We also find that the behavior of the models is affected by changes in the regulatory environment in international markets.]

[We develop a numerical approximation method for valuing multivariate contingent claims. The approach is based on an n-dimensional extension of the lattice binomial method. Closed-form solutions for the jump probabilities and the jump amplitudes are obtained. The accuracy of the method is illustrated in the case of European options when there are three underlying assets.]

[In this article we construct a model in which a consumer's utility depends on the consumption history. We describe a general equilibrium framework similar to Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985a). A simple example is then solved in closed form in this general equilibrium setting to rationalize the observed stickiness of the consumption series relative to the fluctuations in stock market wealth. The sample paths of consumption generated from this model imply lower variability in consumption growth rates compared to those generated by models with separable utility functions. We then present a partial equilibrium model similar to Merton (1969, 1971) and extend Merton's results on optimal consumption and portfolio rules to accommodate nonseparability in preferences. Asset pricing implications of our framework are briefly explored.]

[We present a model of corporate acquisitions in which initially uninformed bidders must incur costs to learn their (independent) valuations of a potential takeover target. The first bidder makes either a preemptive bid that will deter the second bidder from investigating or a lower bid that will induce the second bidder to investigate and possibly compete. We show that the expected price of the target may be higher when the first bidder makes a deterring bid than when there is competitive bidding. Hence, by weakening the first bidder's incentive to choose a preemptive bid, regulatory and management policies to assist competing bidders may reduce both the expected takeover price and social welfare.]