Determining the market values of streams of future returns is a task common to many sorts of economic analysis. The literature on this subject is extensive at all levels of abstraction. However, most work has not taken uncertainty into account in a meaningful way.

Alan Seelenfreund, George G. C. Parker, James C. Van Horne, Stock Price Behavior and Trading, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 3, No. 3, Special Issue: Random Walk Hypothesis (Sep., 1968), pp. 263-281

Introduction, 349. — Objectivity or maximization? 351. — Goals and their sources, 353. — Goals and instruments, 357. — Sources of influence, 365. — Maximizing effectiveness of advice, 369. — Analytical approaches, 375.

I. Introduction, 403. — II. Demand equations and evidence for acceleration, 404. — III. The nonstochastic case: no oscillations without acceleration, 406. — IV. Autocovariances of a linear stochastic system, 408. — V. Spectral densities of a linear stochastic system, 411. —VI. Conclusions, 417.

D IFFERENTIATING a production function with respect to capital and labor yields equations for the marginal productivity of capital and the marginal productivity of labor. The variables that determine the marginal products in these equations are the same as those in the production function. If the data used to estimate the parameters of the production function are inserted into the equations for the marginal products, the marginal productivities of both capital and labor can be estimated empirically. The same data and equations also make it possible to determine the causes of any changes in the marginal products. How much of the rising marginal productivity of labor is caused by technical progress; how much is caused by a rising capital-labor ratio? If the economy is in equilibrium and there are no economies or diseconomies of scale, actual and marginal returns should be identical. Any differences between the estimated marginal products and the actual returns to capital and labor means that the economy is in disequilibrium; the size of the differences measures the extent of disequilibrium. If disequilibrium does exist, what causes the observed pattern? What are its implications for investment decisions in both human and physical capital? This paper applies the above approach to the American economy from 1929 to 1965.

Alan J. Zakon, James C. Pennypacker, An Analysis of the Advance-Decline Line as a Stock Market Indicator, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 3, No. 3, Special Issue: Random Walk Hypothesis (Sep., 1968), pp. 299-314

In “Valuation Under Uncertainty, ” which recently appeared in this Journal (September 1967), Houng-Yhi Chen argues [1, pp. 313–314] that “Robichek and Myers' criticism [2, 3] of the use of the risk-adjusted discount rate is unfounded, ” and suggests that our “conclusions must be based in part on a misunderstanding of the risk-adjusted discount rate method.” These charges are without foundation, as we will show here.