This paper develops a nonparametric approach to examine how portfolio and consumption choice depends on variables that forecast time‐varying investment opportunities. I estimate single‐period and multiperiod portfolio and consumption rules of an investor with constant relative risk aversion and a one‐month to 20‐year horizon. The investor allocates wealth to the NYSE index and a 30‐day Treasury bill. I find that the portfolio choice varies significantly with the dividend yield, default premium, term premium, and lagged excess return. Furthermore, the optimal decisions depend on the investor's horizon and rebalancing frequency.

This paper develops a nonparametric approach to examine how portfolio and consumption choice depends on variables that forecast time‐varying investment opportunities. I estimate single‐period and multiperiod portfolio and consumption rules of an investor with constant relative risk aversion and a one‐month to 20‐year horizon. The investor allocates wealth to the NYSE index and a 30‐day Treasury bill. I find that the portfolio choice varies significantly with the dividend yield, default premium, term premium, and lagged excess return. Furthermore, the optimal decisions depend on the investor's horizon and rebalancing frequency.

Bank safety nets, originally proposed as a means of stabilizing financial systems, have become an important destabilizing influence. Government protection of bank debts encourages banks to undertake excessive risk, particularly in response to adverse shocks to asset values. Reforms that would remove the destabilizing moral hazard consequences of government protection are considered, both from the perspective of economic desirability and political feasibility. Requiring banks to maintain a minimal proportion of subordinated debt finance, and restricting the means by which government recapitalization of insolvent banks occurs are the central features of promising reforms to the safety net.

By many measures, bank consolidation waves, historically and currently, produce substantial efficiency gains associated with reduced operating costs, enhanced diversification, and the enrichment of bank-customer relationships. These gains may be hard to discover in panel or cross-sectional analyses of individual banks because merger waves pose special econometric pitfalls for event studies of stock returns and bank performance comparisons. We review these problems and summarize lessons from nine case studies of individual merger transactions which offer qualitative evidence that potential econometric pitfalls can be important. Those conclusions suggest placing greater weight on cross-regime comparisons for measuring gains during bank merger waves.

We simulate standard tests of performance persistence using alternative return-generating processes, survival criteria, and test methodologies. When survival depends on performance over several periods, survivorship bias induces spurious reversals, despite the presence of cross-sectional heteroskedasticity in performance. Look-ahead biased methodologies and missing final returns typical of U.S. mutual fund datasets can also materially affect persistence measures. Our results reinforce previous findings that U.S. mutual fund performance is truly persistent. When fund performance is truly persistent, fund attrition affects persistence measures, even when the sample includes all nonsurvivor returns. We also examine the specification and power of the various persistence tests.

Many Japanese firms reduced dependence on banks following financial deregulation in the 1980s. The financial architecture of Japanese firms after liberalization provides an opportunity to investigate the choice of financing with public bonds versus monitored bank loans. Examination of accounting and stock price data for a sample of Japanese firms in the late 1980s suggests that debt structure is related to variables that serve as proxies for agency costs of debt. In particular, we find that the proportion of bond debt is inversely related to growth opportunities, while the proportion of bank debt is positively related to growth opportunities.

In response to recommendations by the AICPA Special Committee on Financial Reporting and the Association for Investment Management and Research, the FASB recently invited comment regarding the question, “Given [efficient] markets, would any disservice be done to the interests of individual investors by allowing professional investors access to more extensive information?” [AICPA (1996) Report of the Special Committee on Financial Reporting and the Association for Investment Management and Research, New York, p. 22]. Research in psychology [e.g. Griffin & Tversky (1992) The weighing of evidence and the determinants of confidence. Cognitive Psychology, 411–435] suggests that less-informed investors may suffer from over-confidence and trade too aggressively given their information. This paper reports on an experiment designed to address these issues. In the experiment, security values are determined by the price/book ratios of actual firms, “more-informed” investors observe three value-relevant financial ratios derived from Value-Line reports, and “less-informed” investors observe only one of those signals. Even after market prices have stabilized after many rounds of trading, less-informed investors systematically transfer wealth to more-informed investors as a result of biased prices and overly aggressive trading. However, alerting less-informed investors to the extent of their informational disadvantage eliminates these welfare losses. The results thus suggest that providing information to only professional investors could harm the welfare of less-informed investors if less-informed investors are not aware of the extent of their informational disadvantage.

This study examines the impact of competition on bid-ask spreads in the spot foreign exchange market. We measure competition primarily by the number of dealers active in the market and find that bid-ask spreads decrease with an increase in competition, even after controlling for the effects of volatility. The expected level of competition is time varying, highly predictable, and displays a strong seasonal component that in part is induced by geographic concentration of business activity over the 24-hour trading day. Our estimates show that the expected addition of one more competing dealer lowers the average quoted spread by 1.7%