Abstract Reviews the book "Human Information Processing in Accounting," by Robert H. Ashton.

13'1 rev . .:. Division of Agricultural Sciences UNIVERSITY OF~IFORNLA Working Paper No. 139 R.I>J:~ FUTURES MARKET EFFICIENCY IN THE SOYBEAN COMPLEX Gordon C. Rausser and Colin Carter GIANNINI FOUNDATION OF AGRICULTURAL. ECONOMICS L.IBRAIli'V iM· ( California Agric'u l tural ElqIeriment Station Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics March 1982

This paper tests the hypothesis that the future distribution of payoffs provided by a common stock depends upon whether ownership of the stock also conveys control over the firm's activities. For 26 firms that had two classes of common stock outstanding, the class with superior voting rights traded at a premium relative to the other class. However, in four firms where the ownership structure of the firm also included a class of voting preferred stock, the class of common with superior voting rights traded at a significant discount relative to the class of common with inferior voting rights. The analysis suggests that there are both benefits and costs of corporate control.

Varouj A. Aivazian, Jeffrey L. Callen, Itzhak Krinsky, Clarence C. Y. Kwan, Mean-Variance Utility Functions and the Demand for Risky Assets: An Empirical Analysis Using Flexible Functional Forms, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1983), pp. 411-424

‘Antitakeover’ amendments are amendments to a corporation's charter that impede the ability of an ‘outsider’ to gain control of the firm. A number of individuals and institutions have onjected to such amendments on the grounds that they are not in the best interests of the shareholders of the firms that adopt them. This paper employs event-time methodology to investigate the impact of antitakeover amendments on the common stock prices of firms that adopt them. The results indicate that the announcement of such amendments is associated with a positive revaluation of stock price. Contrary to the concerns of their critics, we conclude that antitakeover amendments are proposed by managers who seek to increase the value of the firm and are approved by stockholders who share that objective.

[In most statistical estimation problems, the distribution of errors is unknown, and the traditional assumption of normality is used for convenience. We investigate here the fragility of the inferences based on normality by hypothesizing a neighborhood of distributions around the normal distribution, and by identifying the set of alternative maximum likelihood estimates corresponding to the set of error distributions.]

William L. Sartoris, Ned C. Hill, A Generalized Cash Flow Approach to Short-Term Financial Decisions, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 38, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings Forty-First Annual Meeting American Finance Association New York, N.Y. December 28-30, 1982 (May, 1983), pp. 349-360