This paper examined the empirical consequences of explicit consideration of purchasing power risk in portfolio decisions. It was shown that, during a period of significant inflation, the differences between the variance-covariance relations of nominal rates of return and those of real rates of return were sufficiently pronounced to change the composition of investment portfolios. Further, it was shown that the set of real efficient portfolios dominates any investment strategy that ignores purchasing power risk.

This paper models the unobservable rate of return on money balances (r) as depending directly on the transactions velocity of money (ν). Approximating this relationship linearly, the efficient markets hyphothesis (EMH) is shown to imply that first differences of the log of ν should either be random or should show negative first-order serial correlation at most. The empirical evidence presented below is consistent with the EMH.

This article develops a criterion for comparing warrant financing with further common stock financing from the viewpoint of a firm's current stockholders. This criterion is then related to a complementary one presented by Bierman [1] and a condition is imposed on Bierman's cost of warrant financing for warrant financing to be preferred to further stock financing. Finally the article considers the limitations of these criteria and qualitatively discusses risk considerations that influence the attractiveness of warrant financing.

This paper investigates optimal consumption and portfolio mixture for a new discrete-time, discrete-state preference model. In this model, the investor's preferences for future consumption depend on current wealth and on past consumption experience through a summary descriptor of past consumption. Relations between the optimal consumption/investment decisions and the wealth and summary descriptor states are found.

The investment managers of financial institutions face a multiplicity of factors that influence the performance of fixed coupon securities in their investment portfolios. These factors can be classified under three headings:

1) Condition of the economy–changes in interest rate levels and spreads;

2) Nature of the financial institution–institution's tax rate, economic factors such as deposit variability and loan demand for banks, and premium inflow and benefit payments for insurance companies;

3) Characteristics of individual securities–(a) their attractiveness in terms of risk level and marketability; and (b) their contractual factors (coupon level and maturity) and tax status.

The concept of immunization is currently one of the most widely discussed innovations in bond portfolio management. The interest in immunization, which allows one to nearly guarantee a minimum return performance over a specified investment horizon, is due in large measure to the desire on the part of bond managers to reduce the risk which has accompanied the recent swings in interest rates.

Modern contingent pricing theory (CPT) dates its genesis from the pioneering work of Arrow [1] and Debreu [9] in the context of complete markets. Beja [2, 3] demonstrated the application of contingent pricing concepts to incomplete markets. The approach has been applied to the valuation of options (Cox and Ross [7]; Rubinstein [30]) and a variety of other financial instruments (e.g., Ross [28])- Tne fundamental insight of CPT is that in arbitrage-free markets complex securities may always be viewed as additive combinations of simple “state-claims” having positive value which, in effect, pay off one unit if and only if a given state is attained at a given date. Concurrently, the continuoustime viewpoint pioneered by Black and Scholes [4] and Merton [22] has grown in significance. The basic simplification of the continuous-time approach is that relevant valuation quantities may all be expressed in terms of the first two moments, i.e., mean and variance, of the state variable distributions employed. When CPT adopts a continuous-time format, it has been shown (Garman [13]) that a basic differential equation holds for all securities; that differential equation involves, of course, the state-claim values, the distributional parameters of state variable evolution, and the prices and dividends of securities. Alternatively, somewhat stronger assumptions which lead to the existence of a rational consensus investor allow thedifferential equation to be expressed in terms of marginal utilities (Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross [8]). This paper applies the techniques of continuous-time CPT to the foreign exchange market. Since we wish to substantively treat inflationary and productive sources of risk in two countries, four state variables are necessarily involved. In a sense, therefore, this is an ambitious attempt since the mostcomplex continuous-time models to date (e.g.. Brennan and Schwartz [5]), have substantively treated only two state variables. Such complexity is simplified through the use of some compact notation, but not by the use of ad hoc modeling. Indeed, it should be emphasized that the present treatment is a full-equilibrium approach, and that while the compact quality of the notation might be made to incorporate a significant amount of possible additional structure, nothing here is inconsistent with a complete equilibrium.

Harry C. Friedman in his paper, “Real Estate Investment and Portfolio Theory,” has put his mind to an increasingly important area of financial concern, the relationship of real estate as a security in developing portfolio theory. Between now and the year 2000, it has been estimated that $1,500 billion will be spent on building and remodeling nonfarm housing. There will be an estimated $1,000 billion spent on commercial, industrial, and utility construction. In addition, $1,000 billion will probably be spent on public utilities and service institutions, plus $30 billion annually on community facilities. It is anticipated that each year in coming generations we will add to our existing inventory the equivalent of fifteen cities of 200,000 persons each. Predictions are that there will be a need for an additional 2 million dwelling units per year during the 1970's and that this need will climb steadily thereafter.

When a company enters into a bond indenture or loan agreement, certain restrictions usually are placed on it. These restrictions, known as protective covenants, may have a significant influence on profitability, making the bargaining strategy of the company very important. But to bargain effectively over the restrictiveness of the protective covenants, management must know the impact that the covenants have on profitability.

Using data from the Stockholm Stock Exchange (SSE), we study the value added by (as distinct from the abnormal returns to) analysts’ recommendations. Recommending brokers’ clients trade profitably around positive recommendations at the expense of other brokers’ clients. Significant profits come from transactions before recommendation dates. Value added is greatest for upgrades to large caps, and largely insignificant for downgrades and recommendations of small caps, despite high abnormal returns. Brokers making profitable recommendations generate abnormally high commission income, recouping much of their clients’ abnormal profits, and their abnormal commission income varies in line with the abnormal profits for their clients.

In a dynamic general equilibrium model, we derive conditions for a mutual fund separation property by which the savings decision is separated from the asset allocation decision. With logarithmic utility functions, this separation holds for any heterogeneity in discount factors, while the generalization to constant relative risk aversion holds only for homogeneous discount factors but allows for any heterogeneity in endowments. The logarithmic case provides a general equilibrium foundation for the growth-optimal portfolio literature. Both cases yield equilibrium asset pricing formulas that allow for investor heterogeneity, in which the return process is endogenous and asset prices are determined by expected discounted relative dividends. Our results have simple asset pricing implications for the time series as well as the cross section of relative asset prices. It is found that on data from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a risk aversion smaller than in the logarithmic case fits best.

I study venture capital firms’ (VCs) use of public market information and how attention to this information relates to private market investment outcomes. I link web traffic to public filings hosted on EDGAR to individual VCs. VCs analyze public information about industry peers before most deals. An increase in industry filing views relates positively to the probability of an exit through acquisition, suggesting that public information helps identify paths to acquisition. The effect is stronger when the VC has less access to private information, especially for low-reputation VCs. Policymakers should consider spillover effects on private markets when setting public disclosure requirements.

In their present paper. Professors Cheng and Deets (hereafter C-D) attempt to derive a measure of instantaneous systematic risk for securities and portfolios which is consistent with the Sharpe-Lintner-Mossin capital asset pricing model when the true market horizon is infinitesimally short. In so doing, they assert that Jensen's resolution of the horizon problem for such a market horizon is incorrect. In the comments which follow, I shall attempt first to indicate explicitly the causes for the differences in the Jensen and C–D results, and second, to evaluate their relative merits.

Recent literature, as it has been developing in this journal and others, suggests that a significant change has taken place in the field of finance. The “new finance” has broader and deeper analytic and empirical content. Its relevant characteristics are: (1) a weakening of the traditional distinction between security analysis and corporation finance; (2) an increased emphasis upon financial management as an integral part of the overall management function; (3) greater emphasis upon the relevance of economic theory in the analysis of financial relations; and (4) more attention to the measurement and testing of hypotheses.

This paper analyzes risk-return relationships in regional and national securities markets. Specifically, it presents methods and results of an investigation of simulated portfolios of common stocks traded on the Minnesota over-the-counter (OTC) market and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

Econometric research in the past two decades has vitnessed a considerable use of dummy variables in regression analysis. The analysis of covariance has long been a standard statistical technique to test the equality of coefficients in linear regressions. While students and researchers are generally aware of the close relationship between the two methods, they are often frustrated at choosing one method instead of the other in practice and wonder whether the two methods lead to the same test results. This note shows that the two methods are equivalent from the point of view of hypothesis testing.

This paper develops the parametric restrictions imposed on diffusion state processes by the requirement of arbitrage-free asset pricing. Using the equivalent martingale measure as a starting point, the diffusion property is exploited to specify the shadow pricing function, which takes conditional state variable probabilities under the reference measure into arbitrage-free contingent claim prices. The main results of the paper provide differential equations associated with the shadow price function that are used to identify restrictions on the parameters of assumed diffusion processes. The paper concludes with an application to the CIR model where the state variable, the instantaneous interest rate, is assumed to follow a square root process. Calculations are also provided for the parametric restrictions imposed on the Brownian bridge and OU state variable processes.

In a recent paper published in this journal [1], Bierman and Hass (BH) developed a model in which the risk differential that an investor would require to compensate him for the risk of default is stated as a function of the following variables: the probability of default on annual interest payments, (1-P1); the probability of default on the principal payment at the end of the maturity of the bond, (1-P2); the default-free rate, i, and the maturity, N.

This paper presents a descriptive theory of risk that may be applied to capital budgeting decisions. The proposed theory is actually much more general than a theory of financial risk and is consistent with reported laboratory experiments. The essential feature of this theory is the role that risk descriptively plays as a constraint in the decision-making process. Specifically, risk is modeled as a chance constraint such that projects are rejected if the probability of “failure” is larger than some prescribed level. This has the effect of making all investment decisions chance-constrained programming problems, although some classes of problems have trivial solution procedures. In this context, risk serves to “strike out” or eliminate alternatives from consideration.

While the value of listing equity securities has been researched extensively, no studies have examined the market reaction to the decision to list corporate debt. Since the listing of corporate bonds on the major exchanges is a significant corporate activity, this study examines the impact of bond listing on shareholder wealth. Using a variety of possible announcement dates as well as cumulative abnormal returns between dates, no detectable market reaction to debt listing is found. Therefore, the listing of corporate bonds does not appear to be valued by the common shareholders of those same firms.