Knowledge that Transforms

To discuss what's right and wrong with the teaching of contemporary money-andbanking courses, we must first distinguish the various species of courses that fall under the M&B genus. In economics departments, the undergraduate M&B course is conceived prototypically in either of two ways: (1) as a basic macroeconomics course, including in principle (though often not in practice) an introductory swipe at international finance, or (2) as a policy course focusing on the art of central banking, including an obligatory introduction to opportunities for intervention in foreign-exchange markets. For convenience, let's call these alternative course conceptions (M&B)1 and (M&B)2, respectively. In business-school finance departments, M&B courses seek primarily to explain how contemporary financial markets and institutions work. These courses develop analytical descriptions of different types of financial transactions, instruments, transactors (with special emphasis on the roles played by intermediaries, dealers, and brokers), and contract terms (with special focus on implicit and explicit yields). Whereas MBA-level offerings are of negligible importance to the typical economics department, they represent a sizeable portion of the finance-department M&B market. Undergraduate M&B courses in finance departments–(M&B)3–differ from MBA-level ones–(M&B)–in assuming that students possess little background or interest in macroeconomic theory per se. (M&B)4 courses shape up as a linear combination of (M&B)3 and either or both (M&B)1 and (M&B)2.

In a recent article in this Journal, Amir Barnea [1] proposes a criterion for assessing the market-making efficiency of New York Stock Exchange specialists. The appealing aspects of Barnea's method are that it uses publicly available data (common stock prices) and operates on a variable of primary concern to investors, the variance of returns on common stock. The difficulty we see in applying his approach, however, is that Barnea's performance criterion can be sensitive to a number of factors in addition to any impact the specialist might have, and that effective specialist intervention might have either a positive or negative impact on the performance measure. Thus, his specialist ranking seems to be quite misleading, and his empirical findings appear to be amenable to a substantially different interpretation than that which he provides.

Traditional models of portfolio selection assume that all assets are traded in competitive markets, so that rates of return to any individual investor are fixed. This paper represents an extension of portfolio theory to the case in which asset markets are not perfectly competitive and rates of return cannot be taken as given. Klein [10] has noted that, when asset markets are imperfect, the separation theorem no longer holds but does not solve explicitly for the relationship between risk and return. Here for simplicity we shall consider the case of the investor who has a monopoly in an asset he creates, so that its risk and return characteristics are determined by the decisions of the portfolio selector and hence are endogenous. It will be shown that even if the market for an asset in the portfolio is imperfectly competitive, as long as the demand curve for the asset is well behaved, the locus of efficient portfolios facing the investor, which is composed of combinations of the riskless asset and the optimal combination of risky assets, will be a concave function, as opposed to a linear function in the competitive case. In other words, the introduction of capital market imperfections does not affect the positive slope of the efficient set of portfolios. Moreover, the expected return on the imperfectly competitive asset will be shown to be easily decomposable into the standard risk premium and a monopoly premium.

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R. N. Anderson, John A. Haslem, John B. Leonard, An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Branching on Demand Deposit Variability, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), pp. 455-464

This article develops a criterion for comparing warrant financing with further common stock financing from the viewpoint of a firm's current stockholders. This criterion is then related to a complementary one presented by Bierman [1] and a condition is imposed on Bierman's cost of warrant financing for warrant financing to be preferred to further stock financing. Finally the article considers the limitations of these criteria and qualitatively discusses risk considerations that influence the attractiveness of warrant financing.

Rowland R. Hill, An Algorithm for Counting the Number of Possible Portfolios Given Linear Restrictions on the Weights, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), pp. 479-480

Several studies have investigated the reaction of the stock market to a firm's changing its method of accounting for external reporting purposes. By contrast, this study investigates the reaction of proper subsets of the stock market to changes in accounting methods–specifically, the reaction of the set of investors in the common stock of the firm which has changed its accounting measurement rules.

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