Aggregation of monies must be determined in accord with the theory using the aggregate. This theory must specify aggregation (1) eligibility rules and (2) weights. Four current methods are evaluated on this basis: Fisher's aggregation bases eligibility on significant quantities Vi of monies Mi and attaches quantity weights Vi/Vn (Vn being numeraire). Pesek-Saving aggregation merely substitutes social marginal value weights Vipi/Vnpn. Friedman-Schwartz aggregation has eligibility depend on good subsequent statistical performance and uses weights given by private marginal values (gross of subsidies). Chetty's aggregation has all assets eligible and weighted by cross-elasticities of demand.

[In this paper we give necessary and sufficient conditions such that a decision maker who operates in a world in which finitely many states of nature can occur has an increasing, strictly concave utility function U(.) and a subjective probability measure P(.) and such that he chooses among acts with uncertain outcomes according to the expected value of U(.) (with respect to P(.)) which they offer him.]

Robert H. Litzenberger, A. P. Budd, Errata: A Note on Geometric Mean Portfolio Selection and the Market Prices of Equities, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Jun., 1972)

Many firms are short of capital. Investment opportunities offering positive net present values often exceed the amount of available internal financing. Management may either impose a capital budget constraint equal to the amount of internally generated funds or finance externally. Assuming that management chooses the latter, it must choose debt, preferred stock, common stock, or various forms or combinations of these securities. Controversy has surrounded the relative costs of debt and equity financing, but, recognizing the tax advantage of debt financing, most theorists agree that a firm will have some debt in its capital structure. This paper will not attempt to examine the important question of the optimal debt/equity ratio in the firm's capital structure but will assume that management has decided it is prudent to issue additional long-term debt. We will delineate the more modest question of the optimal size and timing of the long-term debt issues.

[It is now popular to construct economic models in differential equation form. Perhaps the most serious econometric problem faced when dealing with a differential equation system is the practical difficulty of finding consistent estimates of the important structural parameters. In this paper a simple three-equation Phillips model is considered and consistent estimates of the structural parameters are provided by the minimum-distance procedure. The small-sample distributions of these estimates are investigated by the Monte Carlo method; and the results are then compared with those of the three-stage least-squares estimates found by making a discrete approximation to the system of differential equations.]

R&D, Materiality, Capitalization, Resource allocation decision