The question of whether security return distributions have a finite or an infinite variance has been debated for many years. The possibility that the security return-generating process actually has an infinite variance is particularly vexing since it implies that all statistical techniques and theoretical frameworks utilizing the second (or higher) moment are invalid. While this is clearly not a disaster—alternatives do exist—much of the work which has been done in the field of finance has assumed the existence of the second moment. It is, therefore, important to determine whether or not the security return distribution actually has a finite variance.

On March 28, 1979, failure occurred in one of the two nuclear reactors at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power generation facility owned by General Public Utilities (GPU). This nuclear “accident” was the first of its type in the United States, and much anecdotal evidence suggests that the accident intensified public concern and increased regulatory activity. Since this event, several proposed nuclear plants have been cancelled; safety rules have been tightened; certification (by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) of newly completed nuclear plants has been delayed; and the pressure to curtail or ban the use of nuclear technology continues.

The traditional Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) provides a foundation for the estimation of systematic risk that has been applied extensively in studies of investment performance, market efficiency, predictive models, and capital budgeting, to name only a few. Lee [10] considered a special case of nonlinearities occurring in the estimation of systematic risk within the context of the investment horizon problem. His findings, based on a limited sample, provided significant methodological implications for the estimation process and have received wide readership through republication of the study in a readings text [6].

This note has given results for the probability of committing a Type I error in first-order stochastic dominance when it is assumed that both options have been sampled from the same distribution of returns. The probabilities are based on known results in the stochastic processes and statistical goodness-of-fit literatures, but have not been recognized in connection with the problem of estimation of risk in stochastic dominance. Further work on FSD Type II error probabilities based on ideas in this paper is in progress.

In the analysis of problems of choice under uncertainty, many results depend on the investigator's ability to determine the signs of certain integrals. A recently derived method of doing this—christened the “covariance method” by Batra [2]—demonstrates that, in certain cases, recognition of the fact that the integrals involved are composed of covariance terms can provide a simple and elegant solution to the problem. This paper uses a simple portfolio model to demonstrate that these covariance terms can be exploited to obtain other useful results as well.

A number of recent papers have shown that it is possible for an investor to immunize a portfolio of default and option-free coupon bonds so that the return realized over a given planning period will never be less than that promised at the time the bonds were purchased. In this way, a future fixed dollar liability may be discharged with certainty by acquiring an asset portfolio with a market value equal to the present value of the liability and setting its appropriate duration equal to the time remaining to the date of discharge. However, most investors have more than one liability to discharge. In his seminal article in 1952, F. M. Redington showed that a stream of liabilities may be immunized if an asset portfolio having the same present value as the liabilities is selected so that:

1. its duration is equal to the duration of the liabilities; and

2. “the spread of the value of asset-proceeds about the mean term (duration) should be greater than the spread of the value of the liability” ([16], p. 191).

The elimination in 1975 of fixed minimum brokerage commission rates for agency transactions in equity securities was one of the more highly publicized events in the still-ongoing process of the deregulation of American financial markets. While, prior to that time, commission rates on large stock transactions—that were executed primarily for institutions—had become increasingly subject to negotiation, individual investors effectively faced an industry-wide fixed price schedule for the vast majority of their transactions. At the insistence of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the privilege of negotiation on commission rates was extended to securities trades of all sizes as of May 1, 1975, a date the brokerage industry only half-humorously dubbed “Mayday”.

Recently, the finance literature has included empirical analysis of consumption in asset pricing models based on the cross-equation restrictions implied by optimality of a representative agent's consumption and investment plan. These studies have required some specification of an aggregate utility function, and power (constant relative risk aversion) utility has been predominant. The present paper extends this body of research by including models with constant absolute, as well as constant relative, risk aversion.

In this paper, we explore the nature of equilibria in an asymmetrically informed bank credit market in which credit applicants know their own (intrinsic) default risks, but potential lenders can discover these default risks only by expending resources to produce information. The resolution of informational asymmetries in the capital market is, in the contemporary view, considered a very important function served by financial intermediaries like commercial banks and, in the opinion of some, even the primary justification for their existence [17]. We, therefore, focus on how the presence of asymmetric information—in particular, the response of (expected) profit-maximizing banks to it—affects the equilibrium prices and quantities of credit offered in the banking system.

Commercial banks have been the subjects of a large body of empirical research employing regression and econometric models and discriminant analysis. The purpose of this paper is to empirically identify and describe relationships, including hedging behavior, between the asset side and the liability/capital side of the balance sheets of a cross-section of large U.S. banks. Canonical correlation analysis is the statistical technique that is employed. Unlike regression analysis which explains the behavior of a single dependent variable as a function of a set of independent variables, canonical correlation analysis relates two sets of variables. In the present case, one set of variables is the composition of the lefthand side of the balance sheet and the other set is the right-hand side. The variables used in this study are asset and liability/capital categories expressed as a proportion of total bank assets (i.e., a percentage breakdown of the balance sheet or a common size statement). These proportions are used in lieu of the more usual financial ratios and no information exogenous to the bank is employed.

This paper develops a normative model to analyze the hedging and fee-pricing decisions of a financial institution supplying fixed rate loan commitments to its customers. In supplying fixed rate loan commitments, the financial institution (hereafter referred to as “bank”) is assumed to act as an agent that transforms commitment risk through the use of financial futures contracts. While most previous loan commitment models have analyzed the interest rate (or price) risk the bank faces in supplying fixed rate loan commitments, they either have ignored or assumed away the loan take-down (or quantity) risk.

The original Black-Scholes (BS) [2] European call option pricing model does not take account of divided payments on the underlying stock and does not allow for the possibility of early exercise that may be optimal when the stock pays dividends. Black [1] has suggested that the original BS model can be modified to take account of dividends and Sharpe [14] predicts that this modified or pseudo-American BS approach, “while not exact, is probably sufficient for many listed options.”

Black and Scholes [1] derived the pricing equation for a European put when the stock price follows geometric Brownian motion. For this same case, Merton [5] derived the pricing equation for an American put with infinite time to maturity. Brennan and Schwartz [2], Rubinstein and Cox [7], and Parkinson [6] have developed numerical solutions for the price of an American put. Numerical solutions are expensive and do not provide much intuition. Naturally, an analytic solution would be much preferred; unfortunately, pricing the American put requires solving a formidable and presumably intractable boundary value problem.

The Sharpe-Lintner Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) has always contained an implicit question: what if all investors are single-period wealth maximizers but the length of the single period varies across investors? Gressis, Philappatos, and Hayya (GPH) [7] have pointed out that as the assumption of investment horizon length is changed, the Capital Market Line (CML) intersects the Efficient Frontier (EF) at different points causing different investors to hold different efficient portfolios. GPH assert that these different portfolio holdings will result in an inefficient market portfolio—and dire consequences for the capital market model.

Recent studies by Fisher and Weil [7], Bierwag [2], [3], Bierwag and Kaufman [5], and Khang [9] demonstrate that it is possible to immunize a portfolio of default-free assets against unexpected interest rate changes so that at the end of the planning period the investor will realize at least the returns expected at purchase. However, this immunization strategy is applicable for the case in which the change in unexpected interest rate occurs only once at the instant after the purchase of the asset. Obviously, the case depicted above is not likely to resemble the real world situation in at least two respects. First, the interest rate change is likely to occur at any time and, second, the interest rate change is likely to occur many times during the investor's planning period.

This paper provides a closed-form, preference-free means of valuing a European call option written on a default-free pure discount bond. Investors may not agree upon a theory of the term structure, but they will necessarily agree on equilibrium option values. Further, these equilibrium option values may be obtained without recourse to numerical approximation.

Default-free pure discount bond prices were posited to follow a non-standardized transformed Brownian bridge process. This specification implicitly incorporates the terminal constraint that the price of a default-free pure discount bond equal its face value at maturity.

Contingent claim valuation necessarily involves consideration of terminal constraints on the value of financial securities. The Brownian bridge specification permits an appropriate means of incorporating a number of such constraints. Therefore, while this paper has considered only the application of the Brownian bridge process to the valuation of debt options, the introduction of this process may provide for many further financial applications.

In the world of practical finance, the management of working capital—cash, marketable securities, receivables, and inventories is, perhaps, the most pressing and most frequently encountered problem for financial managers. Yet, in the realm of theoretical finance, and even at the level of “textbook” finance, working capital is given minimal attention.

Recent developments in the literature on bond portfolio management have identified conditions under which uncertainty of the investment return attributable to interest rate changes is eliminated. Such a strategy, called immunization, is achieved when the duration of the bond or portfolio of bonds is equal to the investor's holding period. Duration is defined as a weighted average time to maturity and was originally developed by Macaulay [13]. The condition under which immunization is obtained by setting duration equal to holding period was derived by Redington [14] and Fisher and Weil [10] and further developed by Bierwag and Kaufman [4], Bierwag [2], and Khang [12]. Bierwag [3] has provided a concise summary of the theory of immunization, and Bierwag and Khang [7] show that immunization is equivalent to selecting a strategy in which the worst possible return is maximized, i.e., a minimax strategy. Bierwag [1] examines immunization under multiple shocks to the term structure and Bierwag, Kaufman, and Toevs [6] extend the concept to a general equilibrium, two-state Arrow-Debreu world.