Gregory D. Hawkins, Determinants of Corporate Leasing Policy: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 40, No. 3, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-Third Annual Meeting American Finance Association, Dallas, Texas, December 28-30, 1984 (Jul., 1985), pp. 909-910

Valuation, Dividends, Stock market reaction, Information content

This paper develops a model of "large group" Chamberlinian monopolistic competition in which (1) there are many firms producing differentiated commodities, (2) each firm is negligible in that it can ignore its impact on, and hence reactions from, other firms; (3) free entry leads to zero profit of operating firms; but (4) each firm faces a downward-sloping demand curve. The existence of a monopolistically competitive equilibrium is established. In a companion paper, more particular questions such as whether the market provides too many or too few products are addressed for a special case of the model.

When charitable contributions are tax deductible, the marginal price of charitable giving in other consumption foregone per dollar of contributions is generally less than unity. Further, if the income tax schedule is a progressive step function, the marginal price of contributions is generally a rising step function of the level of contributions. The problem of estimating a contributions demand function for individuals is therefore complicated by the spurious correlation between the level of contributions and the observed marginal price. We take this econometric problem into account in estimating a contributions demand function using data from the 1972-73 Consumer Expenditure Survey. After comparing our results with those of estimation techniques used by other authors, we provide evidence on the impacts of alternative tax policies on charitable giving using our estimates of the model parameters.

This paper presents an approach to defining a market using the notion of instantaneous causality. The market for which the approach is empirically implemented is the flour market in the United States over the period January 1979 through October 1982. One anomaly over this period was the deregulation of railroad rates in October 1980. The empirical results based on three spatially diffuse cities suggest that the market is national in scope and that after railroad deregulation the price interrelationship between cities was strengthened.

The informational efficiency of econometric model forecasts made by Data Resources, Incorporated and Chase Econometrics is evaluated. The criterion tested is an implication of the rational expectations hypothesis. Statistically significant serial correlations are found for several series of one-period forecast revisions, indicating rejection of the efficiency hypothesis. The use of these one-period revisions avoids some problems that have plagued previous tests that employed different efficiency criteria. Alternative explanations of the empirical results are suggested and analyzed.