This paper examines the effects of different types of private debt on firm cash balances, equity risk, and investment. Firms with more bank loans have more cash and investment, but lower equity risk. Firms with more nonbank private debt have more cash, lower equity risk, and less investment. Firms with more unused credit lines have less cash and lower equity risk, but greater investment. Results suggest that financial intermediaries' monitoring intensity increases with loan size. Depending on type, private debt mitigates information asymmetry or asset substitution, or both. Deposit relations associated with bank borrowing also contribute to banks' information advantage.

This paper distinguishes between target-earnings and life cycle motivations for return migration by examining how Philippine migrants' return decisions respond to major, unexpected exchange rate changes in their overseas locations (due to the Asian financial crisis). Overall, the evidence favors the life cycle explanation: more favorable exchange rate shocks lead to fewer migrant returns.A10% improvement in the exchange rate reduces the 12-month return rate by 1.4 percentage points. However, some migrants appear motivated by target-earnings considerations: in households with intermediate foreign earnings, favorable exchange rate shocks have the least effect on return migration, but lead to increases in household investment.

We examine the role of cash flow from operations (CFO) in chief executive officer (CEO) cash compensation. We predict that CFO is contract‐relevant in the presence of earnings, and more so when (1) the quality of earnings relative to the quality of CFO as a measure of performance is low and (2) the need for CFO as a financing source is high. Our analysis is motivated principally by normative arguments and anecdotes from financial disclosures linking CFO to managerial effort and contracts, notwithstanding the traditional role of earnings in performance measurement. We find that the weight of CFO in the compensation model is positive and significant in the presence of earnings and stock returns. We also find that the relative quality of CFO compared with that of earnings has a positive (negative) impact on the weight of CFO (earnings). We further find that the relative weight of CFO is enhanced substantially when enterprise activities crucially depend on internally generated cash flow. These findings are unaltered when we include CEO age, firm size, and risk in the model and allow the coefficients to vary across industries.

The treatment of this article renders closed-form density approximation feasible for univariate continuous-time models. Implementation methodology depends directly on the parametric-form of the drift and the diffusion of the primitive process and not on its transformation to a unit-variance process. Offering methodological convenience, the approximation method relies on numerically evaluating one-dimensional integrals and circumvents existing dependence on intractable multidimensional integrals. Density-based inferences can now be drawn for a broader set of models of equity volatility. Our empirical results provide insights on crucial outstanding issues related to the rank-ordering of continuous-time stochastic volatility models, the absence or presence of nonlinearities in the drift function, and the desirability of pursuing more flexible diffusion function specifications.

This paper examines an exchange economy with heterogeneous indivisible objects that can be substitutable or complementary. We show that a competitive equilibrium exists in such economies, provided that all the objects can be partitioned into two groups, and from the viewpoint of each agent, objects in the same group are substitutes and objects across the two groups are complements. This condition generalizes the well-known Kelso–Crawford gross substitutes condition and is called gross substitutes and complements. We also provide practical and typical examples from which substitutes and complements are both jointly observed.

This paper provides empirical evidence that underreaction in financial analysts' earnings forecasts increases with the forecast horizon, and offers a rational economic explanation for this result. The empirical portion of the paper evaluates analysts' responses to earnings‐surprise and other earnings‐related information. Our empirical evidence suggests that analysts' earnings forecasts underreact to both types of information, and the underreaction increases with the forecast horizon. The paper also develops a theoretical model that explains this horizon‐dependent analyst underreaction as a rational response to an asymmetric loss function. The model assumes that, for a given level of inaccuracy, analysts' reputations suffer more (less) when subsequent information causes a revision in investor expectations in the opposite (same) direction as the analyst's prior earnings‐forecast revision. Given this asymmetric loss function, underreaction increases with the risk of subsequent disconfirming information and with the disproportionate cost associated with revision reversal. Assuming that market frictions prevent prices from immediately unraveling these analyst underreac‐tion tactics, investors buying (selling) stock on the basis of analysts' positive (negative) earnings‐forecast revisions also benefit from analyst underreaction. Therefore, the asymmetric cost of forecast inaccuracy could arise from rational investor incentives consistent with a preference for analyst underreaction. Our incentives‐based explanation for underreaction provides an alternative to psychology‐based explanations and suggests avenues for further research.

We investigate the international transmission of inflation among G-7 countries using data-determined vector autoregression analysis, as advocated by Swanson and Granger [Swanson, N., Granger, C., 1997. Impulse response functions based on a causal approach to residual orthogonalization in vector autoregressions. Journal of the American Statistical Association 92, 357–367]. Over the period 1973–2003, we find that unexpected changes in US inflation have large effects on inflation in other countries, although they are not always the dominant international factor. Similarly, shocks to some other countries also have a statistically and economically significant influence on US inflation. Moreover, our evidence indicates that US inflation has become less vulnerable to foreign shocks since the early 1990s, mainly because of the diminished influence from Germany and France.