The short-run interdependence of prices and price volatility across three major international stock markets is studied. Daily opening and closing prices of major stock indexes for the Tokyo, London, and New York stock markets are examined. The analysis utilizes the autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic (ARCH) family of statistical models to explore these pricing relationships. Evidence of price volatility spillovers from New York to Tokyo, London to Tokyo, and New York to London is observed, but no price volatility spillover effects in other directions are found for the pre-October 1987 period.

Changes in stock prices have substantial explanatory power for U.S. investment, especially for long-term samples, and even in the presence of cash flow variables. The stock market dramatically outperforms a standard q-variable because the market-equity component of this variable is only a rough proxy for stock market value. Although the stock market did not predict accurately after the crash of October 1987, the errors were not statistically significant. Parallel relationships for Canada raise the puzzle that Canadian investment appears to react more to the U.S. stock market than to the Canadian market.

This article shows that the one-state-variable interest-rate models of Vasicek (1977) and Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985b) can be extended so that they are consistent with both the current term structure of interest rates and either the current volatilities of all spot interest rates or the current volatilities of all forward interest rates. The extended Vasicek model is shown to be very tractable analytically. The article compares option prices obtained using the extended Vasicek model with those obtained using a number of other models.

If returns on some stocks systematically lead or lag those of others, a portfolio strategy that sells “winners” and buys “losers” can produce positive expected returns, even if no stock’s returns are negatively autocorrelated as virtually all models of overreaction imply. Using a particular contrarian strategy we show that, despite negative autocorrelation in individual stock returns, weekly portfolio returns are strongly positively autocorrelated and are the result of important cross-autocorrelations. We find that the returns of large stocks lead those of smaller stocks, and we present evidence against overreaction as the only source of contrarian profits.

The procedure for opening stocks on the NYSE appears to affect price volatility. An analytical framework for assessing the magnitude of the structurally induced volatility is presented. The ratio of variance of open-to-open returns to close-to-close returns is shown to be consistently greater than one for NYSE common stocks during the period 1982 through 1986. The greater volatility at the open is not attributable to the way in which public information is released since both the open-to-open return and the close-to-close return span the same period of time. Instead, the greater volatility appears to be attributable to private information revealed in trading and to temporary price deviations induced by specialist and other traders. The implied cost of immediacy at the open is significantly higher than at the close. Other empirical evidence in this article documents the volume of trading at the open, the time delays between the exchange opening and the first transaction in a stock, the difference in daytime volatility versus overnight volatility, and the extent to which volatility is related to trading volume.

The authors of this article present convincing evidence that opening prices differ from closing prices. Their major empirical finding is that returns that are measured from the opening of the market to the next open have higher variance than returns measured from the close of trade to the next close. This result is also found in Amihud and Mendelson (1987), but this article improves on the Amihud-Mendelson study by using a larger sample and by conducting a number of other tests. What is special about opening prices? The authors argue that the higher volatility of open-to-open returns is due to the strategic behavior of the specialist. The specialist sets the opening price in the call auction market that occurs at the open and is allowed to trade from his own account at this price. The authors suggest that in exploiting his monopoly position, the specialist increases the effective bid-ask...

When the price process for a long-lived asset is of a mixed jump–diffusion type, pricing of options on that asset by arbitrage is not possible if trading is allowed only in the underlying asset and a riskless bond. Using a general equilibrium framework, we derive and analyze option prices when the underlying asset is the market portfolio with discontinuous returns. The premium for the risk of jumps and the diffusion risk forms a significant part of the prices of the options. In this economy, an attempted replication of call and put options by the Black–Scholes type of trading strategies may require substantial infusion of funds when jumps occur. We study the cost and risk implications of such dynamic hedging plans.

Event studies often include cross-sectional regressions of announcement effects on exogenous variables. If the event is voluntary and investors are rational, then standard OLS and GLS estimators are inconsistent. Consistent ML estimators are constructed for a cross-sectional model of horizontal mergers relating announcement effects to exogenous characteristics of firms and industries. The OLS and ML estimates differ dramatically for bidders but not for targets. The evidence suggests that managers of bidders, but not targets, have valuable private information about the potential synergies from proposed mergers.

In a model of takeovers under asymmetric information, we identify a separating equilibrium in which the value of the bidder firm is revealed by the mix of cash and securities used as payment for the target. The model predicts that the revealed bidder value is monotonically increasing and convex in the fraction of the total offer that consists of cash. We examine the model restrictions using data from Canada, where mixed offers are both relatively frequent and free of the confounding tax-related options characterizing mixed offers in the United States. We find that the average announcement-month bidder abnormal return in mixed offers is large and significant. However, maximum likelihood estimates of parameters in both linear and nonlinear cross-sectional regressions fail to support the model predictions.