A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.

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Results 82 resources

  • Ten percent of the investment-grade industrial bonds that were associated with major capital restructurings between 1983 and 1988 had already been downgraded to speculative grade as of August 1989. In response to these downgrades and the corresponding wealth losses for bondholders, over 40 percent of recently issued investment-grade industrial bonds are protected from this type of "event risk" by virtue of specialized covenants. These event-risk covenants may have initially reduced interest costs for borrowers by roughly 20 to 30 basis points. However, the magnitude of the effect appears to have declined along with the general decline in corporate restructurings.

  • The presence of any friction in financial markets qualitatively changes the nature of the optimization problem faced by an investor. It requires one to either act or do nothing, an issue which, of course, does not arise in frictionless situations. The investor considered here accumulates wealth without consuming until some terminal point in time when he consumes all. His objective is to maximize the expected utility derived from that terminal consumption. We postpone the terminal point far into the future to obtain a stationary portfolio rule. The portfolio policy is in the form of two control barriers between which portfolio proportions are allowed to fluctuate. We show how to calculate them.

  • A positive slope of the yield curve is associated with a future increase in real economic activity: consumption (nondurables plus services), consumer durables, and investment. It has extra predictive power over the index of leading indicators, real short-term interest rates, lagged growth in economic activity, and lagged rates of inflation. It outperforms survey forecasts, both in-sample and out-of-sample. Historically, the information in the slope reflected, inter alia, factors that were independent of monetary policy and, thus, the slope could have provided useful information both to private investors and to policymakers.

  • The separate variance-ratio tests under homoscedasticity and heteroscedasticity both provide evidence rejecting the random walk hypothesis using five pairs of weekly nominal exchange rate series over the period from August 7, 1974, to March 29, 1989. The rejections cast doubt on the random walk hypothesis in exchange rates, which has received support in the existing literature. Furthermore, since the rejections are robust to heteroscedasticity, they suggest autocorrelations of weekly increments in the nominal exchange rate series, which may be consistent with the exchange rate overshooting or undershooting phenomenon.

  • This paper investigates the stock price behavior of rival firms in the same industry as firms announcing stock repurchase tender offers. Using a sample of 134 repurchase announcements, the author finds that rival firms on average realize insignificant announcement-period abnormal returns. Negative rival stock price performance is detected over longer intervals surrounding the announcement period and for a subset of announcements which ex ante were identified as most likely to affect rivals. This evidence, however, is statistically weak and does little to alter the overall conclusion that the information in repurchase announcements is primarily firm-specific.

  • A simple overlapping generations model is used to characterize the effects of initial margin requirements in the volatility of risky asset prices. Investors are assumed to exhibit heterogenous preferences for risk-bearing, the distribution of which evolves stochastically across generations. This framework is used to show that imposing a binding initial marginal requirement may either increase or decrease stock price volatility, depending upon the microeconomic structure behind fluctuations in economywide average risk-bearing propensity. The ambiguous effect on volatility similarly arises when the source of heterogeneity is noise trader beliefs.

  • This paper evaluates alternative methods for classifying individual trades as market buy or market sell orders using intraday trade and quote data. The authors document two potential problems with quote-based methods of trade classification: quotes may be recorded ahead of trades that triggered them, and trades inside the spread are not readily classifiable. These problems are analyzed in the context of the interaction between exchange floor agents. The authors then propose and test relatively simple procedures for improving trade classifications.

  • This paper develops tests of unconditional mean-variance efficiency under weak distributional assumptions using a generalized method of moments framework. These tests are potentially more robust than commonly employed tests which rely on the assumption that asset returns are normally distributed and temporarily i.i.d. Using returns for size-based portfolios from 1926 to 1988, the authors show that the conclusion concerning the mean-variance efficiency of market indexes can be sensitive to the test considered.

  • This paper examines the hypothesis that an important role of corporate takeovers is to discipline the top managers of poorly performing target firms. The authors document that the turnover rate for the top manager of target firms in tender offer-takeovers significantly increases following completion of the takeover and that prior to the takeover these firms were significantly under-performing other firms in their industry as well as other target firms which had no post-takeover change in the top executive. We interpret the results to indicate that the takeover market plays an important role in controlling the nonvalue maximizing behavior of top corporate managers.

Last update from database: 6/11/24, 11:00 PM (AEST)