Reviews the book "Successful Cash Management in Your Business," by Richard Lee Lehmbeck.

Reviews the book "Management Control: Planning, Control, Measurement and Evaluation," by Kenneth J. Euske.

Real money balances as a factor input in the production function of the large-scale manufacturing sector in Pakistan has been examined in a multi-equation framework. Besides labor and capital, real money balances turned out to be an important factor of production. Our results are in accordance with the pioneering work of Sinai and Stokes in this area.

We extend the standard finance model of the firm's dividend/investment/financing decisions by allowing the firm's managers to know more than outside investors about the true state of the firm's current earnings. The extension endogenizes the dividend (and financing) announcement effects amply documented in recent research. But once trading of shares is admitted to the model along with asymmetric information, the familiar Fisherian criterion for optimal investment becomes time inconsistent: the market's belief that the firm is following the Fisher rule creates incentives to violate the rule. We show that an informationally consistent signalling equilibrium exists under asymmetric information and the trading of shares that restores the time consistency of investment policy, but leads in general to lower levels of investment than the optimum achievable under full information and/or no trading. Contractual provisions that change the information asymmetry or the possibility of profiting from it could eliminate both the time inconsistency and the inefficiency in investment policies, but these contractual provisions too are likely to involve dead-weight costs. Establishing which route or combination of routes serves in practice to maintain consistency remains for future research.

We extend the standard finance model of the firm's dividend/investment/financing decisions by allowing the firm's managers to know more than outside investors about the true state of the firm's current earnings. The extension endogenizes the dividend (and financing) announcement effects amply documented in recent research. But once trading of shares is admitted to the model along with asymmetric information, the familiar Fisherian criterion for optimal investment becomes time inconsistent: the market's belief that the firm is following the Fisher rule creates incentives to violate the rule. We show that an informationally consistent signalling equilibrium exists under asymmetric information and the trading of shares that restores the time consistency of investment policy, but leads in general to lower levels of investment than the optimum achievable under full information and/or no trading. Contractual provisions that change the information asymmetry or the possibility of profiting from it could eliminate both the time inconsistency and the inefficiency in investment policies, but these contractual provisions too are likely to involve dead‐weight costs. Establishing which route or combination of routes serves in practice to maintain consistency remains for future research.

This paper analyzes the empirical behavior of stock-return volatilities prior to and subsequent to the ex-dates of stock splits. The evidence demonstrates rather unambiguously that there is, on the average, an approximately 30% ‘arbitrary’ increase in the return standard deviations following the ex-date. The increase holds for both daily and weekly data, and it is not temporary. No explanatory confounding variables, such as institutional frictions affecting price observations, have been identified. We view the findings as being essentially inconsistent with the notion of ‘rational pricing’.