Quarterly earnings, Nonseasonal earnings, Time-series model, Forecasting content

Several recent papers have tested the permanent income-cum-rational expectations hypothesis using data on nondurable or semidurable consumption. We show how this approach can be extended to the case of durables. An application to panel data on automobile expenditures reveals no evidence against the permanent income hypothesis. This result is unchanged in subsamples segregated by family holdings of liquid assets.

This study presents the first evidence on the relation of consumption to lifetime wealth, based on data from the 1973 and 1975 Retirement History Survey that have been linked to Social Security earnings records.

Reviews the book "Principles of Accounting," by Belverd E. Needles, Henry Anderson and James Caldwell.

Reviews the book "Words! Combining Fun and Learning," by William Paton.

This paper analyses a class of iterative planning procedures that can be applied in environments describable by the Leontief-Samuelson technology. Members of the class are distinguished by the extent of the communication of technical information from firms to the Centre. All members of the class are monotonic and convergent, but the speed and finiteness of convergence is shown to depend critically on the extent of the transfer of technical information throughout each procedure. The paper thus establishes a trade-off between the informational and performance properties of a class of resource allocation mechanisms, taking environmental coverage as given.

This paper considers a firm that must issue common stock to raise cash to undertake a valuable investment opportunity. Management is assumed to know more about the firm's value than potential investors. Investors interpret the firm's actions rationally. An equilibrium model of the issue-invest decision is developed under these assumptions. The model shows that firms may refuse to issue stock, and therefore may pass up valuable investment opportunities. The model suggests explanations for several aspects of corporate financing behavior, including the tendency to rely on internal sources of funds, and to prefer debt to equity if external financing is required. Extensions and applications of the model are discussed.