Cheng F. Lee, Chunchi Wu, K. C. John Wei, The Heterogeneous Investment Horizon and the Capital Asset Pricing Model: Theory and Implications, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), pp. 361-376

This paper examines some of the forces that can lead to herd behavior in investment. Under certain circumstances, managers simply mimic the investment decisions of other managers, ignoring substantive private information. Although this behavior is inefficient from a social standpoint, it can be rational from the perspective of managers who are concerned about their reputations in the labor market. We discuss applications of the model to corporate investment, the stock market, and decision making within firms.

The information contained in one model's forecast compared to that in another can be assessed from a regression of actual values on predicted values from the two models. We do this for forecasts of real GNP growth rates for different pairs of models. The models include a structural model (the Fair (1976) model), various versions of the vector autoregressive (VAR) model, and various versions of a model we call the "autoregressive components" (AC) model. Our procedure requires that forecasts make no use of future information, and we have been careful to try to insure this, including using the version of the Fair model that existed in 1976, the beginning of our test period.

This paper examines the variance of hourly market returns during 1964-89. Results indicate that return volatility falls from the opening hour until early afternoon and rises thereafter, and is significantly greater for intraday versus overnight periods. Market variance is also shown to change significantly over time, rising after NASDAQ began in 1971, rising after trading in stock options began in 1973, falling after fixed commissions were eliminated in 1975, rising after trading in stock index futures was introduced in 1982, and falling after margin requirements for stock index futures became larger in 1988.

One question development economists are especially interested in, but so far left unanswered, is: how would the societal income distribution be affected by introducing a family-planning program to reduce the reproduction rate of the poor, which is usually high in developing countries? The purpose of this paper is to search for analytical answers to this question. We are able to make definite comparisons about some class of inequality measures of the steady-state societal income distributions, and these comparisons provide strong theoretical support in favor of the above-mentioned family-planning program.

Our estimates of the pay-performance relation (including pay, options, stockholdings, and dismissal) for chief executive officers indicate that CEO wealth changes $3.25 for every $1,000 change in shareholder wealth. Although the incentives generated by stock ownership are large relative to pay and dismissal incentives, most CEOs hold trivial fractions of their firm's stock, and ownership levels have declined over the past 50 years. We hypothesize that public and private political forces impose constraints that reduce the pay-performance sensitivity. Declines in both the pay-performance relation and the level of CEO pay since the 1930s are consistent with this hypothesis.

We formulate a complete, but analytically simple, equilibrium model of vertical mergers to evaluate the logic of standard vertical foreclosure claims and the criticisms made of those claims. The model includes incentives of the integrated firm and unintegrated input supplies to exclude rivals, the potential counter-strategies of competitors to these foreclosure threats, and the potential hold-out problem. In this fully specified model, vertical foreclosure can emerge in equilibrium.

Econometric analysis often addresses model misspecification due to the improper pooling of observations. One major problem in testing for improper pooling is the requirement that alternative stratifications be obtained from others through sets of restrictions (i.e., that they be nested stratifications), thus eliminating a large class of alternative non-nested stratifications. We propose that non-nested tests can be used to compare non-nested stratifications. We formally define the econometric problem, and show the applicability of the J, JA, Cox and non-nested F tests. We then use the four tests to compare spatial stratifications in a model of a house price determination.