Corporations tender for their own shares for a variety of reasons. Some stock tenders are made for strategic purposes—to prevent a take-over, to raise the market price of the stock, or simply because the stock represents ‘a good investment.’ For discussion of tendering in these situations, see the articles of Ellis [2] and Guthart [1]. In addition, there may be tactical reasons for a stock tender; one such reason is to reduce bookkeeping and shareholder servicing costs. In this instance, the argument runs roughly as follows: “The annual cost of servicing a holding is independent of the number of shares; consequently, the cost per share of servicing small holdings is relatively great. Let us reduce these high per-share costs by buying up small holdings.” Typical procedure is to then mail out an offer to buy holdings of less than a certain size directly, thus permitting the shareholder to dispose of his holding without paying the usual brokerage and odd-lot fees. Frequently no premium is offered except for the avoidance of brokerage fees. If one were to consider the premium offered as a controllable variable, it would be surprising to discover that its optimal value were exactly zero. One also recognizes that the maximum shareholding tendered for may be another decision variable available for optimization. See the appendix for data on tenders of this sort made in recent years. The variety of policies seems to indicate an almost complete absence of systematic application of the ideas presented here.

In a recent article, Donald R. Hodgman set forth a framework for analyzing commercial bank lending behavior which emphasized the relationship of customers to their banks as both depositors and borrowers. Specifically, Hodgman links the borrower's contract rate of interest to the profitability of his deposit account, i.e., banks compete for profitable deposit customers by offering the customer a rate which is lower than the comparable open market rate (adjusted for risk). Hodgman uses the terms deposit relationship and customer relationship to describe this behavior. He argues that compensating balance requirements, the prime rate convention, and provision of services below cost may be viewed as a systematic, rational attempt by commercial banks to maximize long-run profit under existing institutional arrangements when viewed from the perspective of the customer relationship.

During the first half of 2020, the difference in savings from mortgage refinancing between high- and low-income borrowers was 10 times higher than before. This was the result of two factors: high-income borrowers increased their refinancing activity more than otherwise comparable low-income borrowers and, conditional on refinancing, they captured slightly larger improvements in interest rates. Refinancing inequality increases with the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and is characterized by an underrepresentation of low-income borrowers in the pool of applications. We estimate a difference of $5 billion in savings between the top income quintile and the rest of the market.

The measures of risk proposed by Vinso are properly motivated with a concern for the dynamic nature of a firm's operations. The measures are subject to restrictions in application and interpretation, however. Some of these restrictions were caused by the choice of the Cornish-Fisher expansion to incorporate the adjustment for skewness and the resulting quadratic equation. The problems created by the existence of multiple real or imaginary roots to this equation are unresolved in the paper.

Apart from these problems, the measures do not represent probabilities of ruin; they often significantly understate the true probability. We have shown that the measures related to εrp are applicable only to firms with positive-drift processes and argue that they should be evaluated in a multivariate context.

The theory of portfolio selection and diversification developed by Markowitz [22] and Tobin [33] was based primarily on the criterion of meanvariance (MV) efficiency. The objective was to select an efficient set of portfolios from which every risk averter will choose the optimal portfolio which maximizes his expected utility. The MV criterion is the appropriate rule either for the case in which the utility function is quadratic or if the returns are normally distributed and risk aversion is assumed.

The hypothesis that corporate directors determine dividend payments by applying target payout ratios and related parameters to current and past earnings has gained widespread acceptance in recent years as a generally applicable account of dividend policy. One reason for the acceptance of this view appears to be its success in predicting the behavior of aggregate measures of dividends in time series regression analyses. The interpretation of these findings as supporting the target payout hypothesis may well be incorrect since the behavior of aggregate magnitudes need bear no direct and close relationship to the behavior of individual firms. This paper attacks the target payout hypothesis on two grounds: it shows that the behavioral characteristics of the firm assumed by the hypothesis have no satisfactory basis in managerial motivation; and it presents data relating to the dividend policies of individual firms for which the hypothesis fails to account.

Several studies have investigated the reaction of the stock market to a firm's changing its method of accounting for external reporting purposes. By contrast, this study investigates the reaction of proper subsets of the stock market to changes in accounting methods–specifically, the reaction of the set of investors in the common stock of the firm which has changed its accounting measurement rules.

Despite apparent implications of normative portfolio theory for portfolios that incorporate a wide variety of marketable security forms, most of the literature concerned with application or empirical testing of the theory has considered portfolios composed only of common stocks, cash, and the proverbial riskless bond. However, nonequity securities constitute a significant component of investors' total financial wealth, and broadly diversified securities portfolios are commonplace. The objectives of this paper are to examine the risk characteristics of 19 classes of long-term marketable securities, ranging from U.S. government bonds to speculative common stocks, and to explore some implications of these characteristics for diversification of actual securities portfolios. The first section presents some risk measures for these security classes which are derived from ex post holding period return data for the 18 years, 1951–1968. This section includes an appraisal of the efficacy of alternative approaches to the generation of the matrix of interrelationships among the returns of broad types of securities. The second section utilizes the ex post risk measures to explore the composition of minimum risk portfolios consisting of two types of marketable securities, and the final section considers the question of appropriate media for the efficient diversification of common stock portfolios.

The author argues, in this paper, that there are at least three reasons why a simultaneous equation bias may exist and be significant in single equation estimates of executive compensation when one of the independent variables is a measure of firm performance. First, there is simultaneity between the determination of the MRP of the executive input and profit maximizing output in the classical microeconomic sense. Second, where firm performance is used as a measure of executive quality, then a simultaneous bias may develop. Third, the presence of expense preference behavior could result in simultaneous but inverse effects on executive compensation and firm performance.

Choice under uncertainty may be viewed as choice between alternative probability distributions of returns. Under Von Neumann and Morgenstern's assumptions, an individual's optimal choice is a distribution that maximizes the expected utility of returns. In the theoretical analysis, the distribution functions are assumed to be known However, in most realistic cases, the distributions of returns are unknown and are estimated using available economic data. The traditional mode of analysis is to neglect the estimation risk and use the estimated distribution (in lieu of the true distribution) in determining the optimal choice under uncertainty. In this paper, we consider the portfolio choice problem and determine the effect of estimation risk on an individual's optimal choice under uncertainty.

This paper develops a hypothesis regarding the factors which influence the average maturity of corporate debt, and the hypothesis is tested with a cross-sectional sample of large industrial firms. The sample consists of 159 companies from the Fortune 500 list of the largest industrial firms as of 1971. A linear regression model is developed with the firm's average debt maturity expressed as a function of the firm's asset maturity, size, variability of income, growth, and the proportion of debt in the firm's capital structure.

Current conditions in the money and credit markets, along with the memory of the “crunch” of late 1966, have caused both the managers of financial institutions and their regulators to reconsider their concepts of “liquidity.” Both Minsky and Ritter have argued forcefully that traditional attention paid to balance sheet proportions should be abandoned in favor of an intertemporal analysis of cash flows [6], [7], and [8]. Ritter states that: “With a multidimensional cash flow forecast extending several years into the future, probability estimates can be made regarding potential liquidity needs over time” [8]. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a forecasting method which explicitly deals with the problem of uncertainty. The method is specifically designed for a mutual savings bank, but it could easily be adapted for a savings and loan association and, with perhaps greater effort, a commercial bank.2 In Section I, components of cash inflows and outflows are examined with the general objective of classification according to: (1) degree of uncertainty and (2) degree of management control. A risk analysis simulation model which permits explicit consideration of uncertainty is presented in Section II. Problems of implementing the model are discussed in Section III, while the implications of the analysis for future research are considered in Section IV.

The facts of increased institutional trading on the nation's securities markets are by now well known. On the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the six major institutional groups—insurance companies, investment companies, noninsured pension funds, nonprofit institutions, common trusts, and mutual savings banks, now own more than one-fourth of the market value of listed shares compared with less than 16 percent at the end of 1956. But, ownership is merely the tip of the perennial iceberg, since institutional trading of stock has become much more significant than institutional ownership. This fact is pointed up in the recent SEC Study of Institutional Investors. It shows that there has been a relatively slow increase in the share of outstanding stock owned by institutions in all markets, but the institutional share of trading has mushroomed.

For as long as governments have intervened in economic affairs, private decision makers have searched for signs and indicators of ongoing or impending government actions. A century ago, anxious British bankers relied on changes in the bank rate to provide them with information on the intent of the Bank of England. Contemporary decision makers not only analyze changes in policy-tools monetary, fiscal, or debt policy actions—but they carefully scrutinize the words of ever more talkative economic policy makers. The State Department's legendary crew of “China watchers” could not analyze pronouncements by Chairman Mao any more carefully than money market bankers and security dealers analyze an economic report of the President or a speech by the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

CEO trustworthiness is positively related to long-term excess returns after buyback announcements. When the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is trustworthy, statements that the stock is undervalued are more credible. CEO trustworthiness is initially measured by the extent to which people in the county where the company headquarters is located trust each other. Further, the positive impact of trustworthiness on excess returns is higher when the CEO has been a long-term resident of a high-trust county, and correspondingly, trustworthy CEOs are less likely to be accused of financial misreporting. Our conclusions are confirmed when we use alternative measures of trustworthiness such as employee trust and CEO integrity.

In my article, I have discussed the relationship between the internal rate of return, K, and Kp which denotes the reciprocal of the payoff period under several alternative assumptions.