Recently, calendar spread futures, futures contracts whose underlying asset is the difference of two futures contracts with different delivery dates, have been successfully introduced for a number of financial futures contracts traded on the Chicago Board of Trade. A spread futures contract is not an obvious financial innovation, as it is a derivative on a derivative security: a spread futures position can be replicated by taking positions in the two underlying futures contracts, both of which may already be quite liquid. This paper provides a motivation for this innovation, demonstrating how the introduction of spread futures can, by changing the relative trading patterns of hedgers and informed traders, affect equilibrium bid–ask spreads, improve hedger welfare, and potentially improve market-maker expected profits. These results are robust both to allowing serial correlation of asset price changes, and investor preference for skewness.

We apply Haider and Solon’s generalized errors‐in‐variables model to Swedish income tax data to produce estimates of the association between current and lifetime income. Our estimates demonstrate strong life‐cycle patterns. This implies that the widespread use of current income as a proxy for lifetime income leads to inconsistent parameter estimates (i.e., life‐cycle bias) even when the proxy is used as the dependent variable. Estimates for comparable cohorts of Swedish and American men demonstrate surprising similarities. There are, however, significant gender and cohort differences in this association that lead to statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful differences in life‐cycle biases.

This paper examines the effects of macroeconomic announcements on equity index markets using high frequency transactions data for the regular and E-mini S&P 500 index futures contracts. For ten types of announcements that significantly affect prices, we analyze the price adjustment process and the trading patterns of exchange locals and off-exchange customers around the announcements. We find a large increase in trading activity immediately after the announcement. The results also show that during this initial surge in trading activity, locals are able to time their trades better than off-exchange traders even when locals do not have the advantage of access to the order flow. The trading strategy followed by exchange locals in the first 20 seconds after the announcement tends to be profitable, while off-exchange traders tend to make losing trades over the same time period. These results lend evidence that local traders tend to react to the macroeconomic information faster than off-exchange traders.

If managers induce employees to hold company stock in defined contribution pension plans as a form of takeover defense, then changes in state laws that enhance managerial protection should lead to a reduction in employer stock in 401(k) plans. Delaware's mid-1990s validation of the poison pill in conjunction with a staggered board was followed by a significant decline in employee ownership within defined contribution plans for firms incorporated in Delaware. Evidence using governance data suggests that this is due to responses of firms with staggered boards. Binary choice models confirm that employee ownership in defined contribution plans lowers takeover probabilities.

According to conventional wisdom, industrial country floating exchange rates contain unit roots. SUR tests on panels of monthly Group of Ten (G-10) log nominal rates reject the null of unit roots for various samples over the current float with significance levels from 0.5% to 15%. On average, in out-of-sample forecasts mean reversion models beat random walks significantly in some forecast periods. For monthly data, the range of expected USD-DEM appreciation rates exceeds 15% per year in the mean reversion model. Mean reversion places strong restrictions on international models: over the sample period, the G-10 had to run monetary policies consistent with stable long-run nominal rates.