Currently available health insurance contracts often fail to insure long-term illnesses: sick people can suffer large increases in premiums or denial of coverage. I describe insurance contracts that solve this problem. Their key feature is a severance payment. A person who is diagnosed with a long-term illness and whose premiums are increased receives a lump sum equal to the increased present value of premiums. This lump sum allows him or her to pay the higher premiums required by any insurer. People are not tied to a particular insurer or a group, and the improvement is free: insurance companies can operate at zero economic profits, and consumers can pay exactly the same premium they do with standard contracts.

This paper evaluates the influence of financial contracting costs on public corporations' incentives to lease fixed capital. We argue that firms facing high costs of external funds can economize on the cost of funding by leasing. We construct several measures of leasing propensity, plus some a priori indicators of the severity of financial constraints facing firms. We find that the share of total annual fixed capital costs attributable to either capital or operating leases is substantially higher at lower-rated, non-dividend-paying, cash-poor firms — those likely to face relatively high premiums for external funds.

Microstructure research has recently forged two theoretical frameworks characterizing stock specialist behavior: a Walrasian inventory-theoretic individual optimization model sometimes with asymmetric information, and a queue-theoretic disequilibrium market model of the continuous auction process. To test the Brock and Kleidon (Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 16 (1992) 451–489) continuous auction process, two simultaneous autoregressive equations for ask prices and for bid prices are estimated using transactions data for IBM for calendar year 1988. The results support Brock and Kleidon's distinguishing implications — namely, increased trading volume raises the ask and lowers the bid, and a Hausman-type specification test fails to reject the exogeneity of order flows at the bid and the ask. Also, greater price volatility within a fifteen minute interval leads to both lower bids and lower asks as buyers are accorded a risk premium, consistent with Brown, Harlow and Tinic's (Journal of Financial Economics, 22 (1988) 355–385) uncertain information hypothesis for efficient markets.

Banking, Regulatory capital, Financial reporting, Tax incentives

The equity premium puzzle refers to the empirical fact that stocks have outperformed bonds over the last century by a surprisingly large margin. We offer a new explanation based on two behavioral concepts. First, investors are assumed to be “loss averse,” meaning that they are distinctly more sensitive to losses than to gains. Second, even long-term investors are assumed to evaluate their portfolios frequently. We dub this combination “myopic loss aversion.” Using simulations, we find that the size of the equity premium is consistent with the previously estimated parameters of prospect theory if investors evaluate their portfolios annually.

We examine how prices in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets adjust to the new information contained in scheduled macroeconomic news releases in the very short run. Using 10-second returns and tick-by-tick data, we find that prices adjust in a series of numerous small, but rapid, price changes that begin within 10 seconds of the news release and are basically completed within 40 seconds of the release. There is some evidence that prices overreact in the first 40 seconds but that this is corrected in the second or third minute after the release. While volatility tends to be higher than normal just before the news release, there is no evidence of information leakage. In our analysis, we correct for the biases created by bid-ask spreads and tick-by-tick data.

Examines possible determinants of firms' decisions to reduce benefits of retiree health care plans. Increasing contracting cost caused by the financial reporting consequences of Statement on Financial Accounting Standards SFAS No. 106; Financial weakness independent of SFAS No. 106; Firm-specific changes in retiree health care costs.

Reviews the book `Operating and Financial Review: Views of Analysts and Institutional Investors,' by Pauline Weetman, Bill Collins and Elizabeth Davie.

We present an economic mechanism and supportive empirical evidence for the transmission of information between equity securities first documented by Lo and MacKinlay (1990). It is argued that the past returns on stocks held by informed institutional traders will be positively correlated with the contemporaneous returns on stocks held by noninstitutional uninformed traders. Evidence consistent with this hypothesis is then presented. We document that the returns on the portfolio of stocks with the highest level of institutional ownership lead the returns on portfolios of stocks with lower levels of institutional ownership. This effect persists even after firm size is controlled for and is apparent at longer lags than the size-related lag effects documented in Lo and MacKinlay (1990).