The sequential treatment adopted in many multiple signal studies is consistent with a simultaneous treatment and with other apparently diverse sequential approaches. More importantly, the conventional residual security return research design, which is also a sequential approach, can lead to downward-biased estimates of the incremental explanatory power of the accounting variables introduced at the second stage. This finding is striking in that it implies that the most pervasive use of a sequential approach is likely to lead to biased results.

Reviews the book 'TREAT,' by Miklos A. Vasarhelyi and W. Thomas Lin.

The divesting of corporate assets has become quite popular. Previous studies of divestitures have found conflicting impacts upon shareholders' wealth of the buying firm. This study measures the impacts of product‐line relatedness between the acquiring firm and the divested unit and financial weakness of the selling firm upon the abnormal returns to the acquiring firm. Although the study finds that the impact of financial strength of the seller is ambiguous, the purchase of related assets produces more wealth than does the purchase of unrelated divested units. Further, firms that purchase related divested units have larger proportions of insider ownership.

This paper applies the multi‐period investment model to a universe of international securities on the basis of the simple probability assessment approach. Our principal findings are: 1) the gains from including non‐U.S. asset categories in the universe were remarkably large (in some cases statistically significant), especially for the highly risk‐averse strategies, 2) the gains from removing the no leverage constraint were more substantial than they were in the absence of non‐U.S. securities, and 3) there is strong evidence of market segmentation in that the optimal levels of investment in U.S. securities were mostly zero in the presence of the non‐U.S. asset categories.

We explain how to award a monopoly franchise so as to maximize expected consumers' welfare. Potential producers initially possess imperfect private information about production cost. The franchise is awarded to the producer with the lowest expected costs, but prices exceed realized marginal costs. These ex post distortions foster more competitive bidding ex ante. The distortions for any bid-cost pair are invariant to the number of bidders (n), though expected distortions and profits decline with n.