This paper analyzes dual trading on futures contracts restricted by Chicago Mercantile Exchange Rule 552. Using floor trader data, several categories of traders are identified, and differences in strategies and profitability are examined. When unrestricted, dual traders execute most customer orders and few personal trades. The evidence supports the hypothesis that dual traders are superior brokers. However, there is no evidence of informational advantages in dual traders' personal trading. Dual traders are shown to provide liquidity with their personal trades. Finally, Rule 552 does not appear to have increased trading costs.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: G12, G13, D82.

This paper presents an analytical model of underwriting capacity and insurance market equilibrium under an asymmetric corporate tax schedule characterized by incomplete tax-loss offsets. We show that reinsurance causes tax shields to be reallocated to those insurers that have the greatest capacity for utilizing them. Reinsurance is therefore used as an efficient short-run mechanism to yield the optimal allocation of tax shield benefits. In equilibrium, asymmetric taxes cause insurance prices to be actuarially unfair, and the expected return on capital invested in insurance reflects the probability of paying taxes.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: G22.

This paper examines if the stock market prices discretionary accruals. Evidence reveals that, on average, the market attaches value to discretionary accruals. This evidence is consistent with two alternative scenarios: (1) managerial discretion improves the ability of earnings to reflect economic value, and (2) discretionary accruals are opportunistic and value-irrelevant but priced by an inefficient market. Further evidence is consistent with the former explanation. There is evidence of pervasive income smoothing, which improves the persistence and predictability of reported earnings. There is also evidence that discretionary accruals predict future profitability and dividend changes. Despite several sensitivity checks, measurement error in the discretionary accruals proxy is an alternative explanation for the results.

Despite empirical evidence pointing to a strong similarity between lease contracts and junk bonds, the theoretical modeling of equilibrium lease determination has been confined primarily to default-free leases. This paper provides a unified framework for determining the equilibrium credit spread on leases subject to default risk. The model is flexible enough to be applied to a wide variety of real-world leasing structures, including security deposits, required up-front prepayments, embedded lease options, leases indexed to use, and lease credit insurance contracts.

This paper focuses on how best to measure the corporate marginal tax rate, which is an important input into financial analysis of the cost of capital, financing policy, corporate hedging, and corporate reorganizations. The results indicate that the simulated tax rate used by Shevlin (1990) and Graham (1996), although difficult to calculate, is the best available proxy for the ‘true’ marginal tax rate. If the simulated rate is unavailable, an easy-to-calculate trichotomous variable or the statutory marginal tax rate (which captures the progressivity in the tax schedule) are reasonable alternatives, better than most commonly used tax variables.

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We analyze the advice contained in a sample of 237 investment newsletter strategies over 1980-1992. Each newsletter strategy recommends a mix of equity and cash. We find no evidence that letters systematically increase equity weights before market rises or decrease weights before market declines. While there is no information in the newsletter strategies about future market returns, we document that disagreement among the newsletters is correlated with future realized and implied volatility.

This paper develops a multicommunity model and analyzes policies that affect spending on public education and its distribution across communities. We find that policies that on net increase the fraction of the (relatively) wealthiest residents in the poorest community are welfare enhancing; policies that decrease this fraction can make all worse off. Appropriately financed policies to (i) redistribute income toward the poorest, (ii) increase spending on education in the poorest community, and (iii) make the poorest community more attractive to relatively wealthier individuals, produce chain reactions in which the quality of education increases and tax rates fall in all communities.

Short-window earnings response coefficients estimated from pooled time-series cross-sectional regressions are systematically smaller than corresponding averages of firm-specific coefficients estimated from time-series regressions. The cause is a negative relation between firm-specific earnings response coefficients and unexpected earnings variances. If the hypotheses of equality of firm-specific coefficients and equality of firm-specific unexpected earnings variances are rejected, firm-specific estimation should be used instead of pooled estimation. Using pooled estimation may lead to incorrect inferences about the magnitude of estimated coefficients and/or incorrect inferences about differences in coefficient behavior between groups of firms.