This paper attempts to shed light on the continuing debate regarding executive compensation by comparing the income of S&P 500 CEOs with that of the presidents of elite private universities. The results reveal that university presidents are paid only a fraction of what CEOs are paid less than 5% in 2000. Nonetheless, universities are able to attract leaders with qualifications and accomplishments equivalent to that of the most distinguished CEOs. Furthermore, university presidents appear to be willing to work as hard and as much in the interests of their constituents as corporate CEOs despite the lack of any meaningful incentive clauses in their contracts. These results suggest that the standard principal-agent model used in evaluating compensation needs to be extended significantly before it can be applied to situations in which a few select people are recruited for highly paid jobs that offer the chance to lead major institutions.

Bradford Cornell, The Denomination of Foreign Trade Contracts Once Again, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 15, No. 4, Proceedings of 15th Annual Conference of the Western Finance Association, June 19-21, 1980, San Diego, California (Nov., 1980), pp. 933-944

Breeden's demonstration that Merton's multi-beta capital asset pricing model can be collapsed into a single-beta model where betas are computed with respect to aggregate consumption is an important theoretical advance. Nonetheless, Breeden's model retains many of the empirical problems that beset Merton's earlier version. In general the consumption betas will be nonstationary, so that the state variables must be observable for the model to be estimated.

This note argues that though Dave Mayers and Edward Rice were able to show that the CAPM could be used to detect superior investors in a world of asymmetric information, their demonstration does not resurrect the CAPM as a practical tool for performance measurement. To employ the Mayers-Rice model, an investment advisor would first have to determine that the CAPM holds for uninformed investors. As a means of avoiding the problem of testing the CAPM, a performance measure based only on returns is outlined. The measure is robust in that it would correctly designate superior investors in context of the CAPM, the arbitrage pricing model and many other equilibrium models of security pricing.

This paper examines the relationship between forward exchange rates and subsequently observed spot rates. No evidence is found for a liquidity premium on forward exchange, indicating that the forward rate can be used as a proxy of the market's expectations and that open exchange positions involve little systematic risk. It is also shown that forward exhange is priced as if the exchange rate could be characterized by a diffusion process with a trend, although there is some evidence such a process does not adequately characterize the exchange rate in all cases.