In the application of modern portfolio theory, the systematic risk of a security is of central importance. Beta (β), the future regression coefficient of the return of the security on the return of the market, is an index of that risk. Since the future is yet to be revealed, nonclairvoyant practitioners and researchers must rely on estimated rather than actual values of beta and the estimates must be based on data that are currently available.

We develop a positive theory of the hedging behavior of value-maximizing corporations. We treat hedging by corporations simply as one part of the firm's financing decisions. We examine (1) taxes, (2) contracting costs, and (3) the impact of hedging policy on the firm's investment decisions as explanations of the observed wide diversity of hedging practices among large, widely-held corporations. Our theory provides answers to the questions: (1) why some firms hedge and others do not; (2) why firms hedge some risks but not others; and (3) why some firms hedge their accounting risk exposure while others hedge their economic value.

In this paper, insider trading is viewed as a signal of managements' assessments of firms' future prospects and its information content is compared to that in managements' earnings forecasts. These forecasts are explicit statements of managements' assessments of future prospects. A number of measures of insider trading designed to capture the information aspect of trading are investigated. The results indicate that the insider trading measures do not capture the information conveyed in earnings forecasts, although there is evidence that insider trading measures that take into account the timing of trades relative to the date of the release of the forecast are informative.

This paper presents a model of equilibrium in a capital market for linear shares of risky firms andin a market for managerial labor in which market participants function as both investors and managers. The model yields interesting and relevant equilibrium conditions that integrate earlier separate treatments of the capital market with human capital and the incentive contracting problem regarding shirking.The theory developed here provides a microeconomic explanation of how the price of risk established in the capital market is relevant to the labor contracting problem. The analysis also provides a logical rationale for the division of responsibilities between a board of directors and the management of the firm.

We propose a simple model of equilibrium asset pricing in which there are differences in the amounts of information available for developing inferences about the returns parameters of alternative securities. In contrast with earlier work, we show that parameter uncertainty, or estimation risk, can have an effect upon market equilibrium. Under reasonable conditions, securities for which there is relatively little information are shown to have relatively higher systematic risk when that risk is properly measured, ceteris paribus. The initially very limited model is shown to be robust with respect to relaxation of a number of its principal assumptions. We provide theoretical support for the empirical examination of at least three proxies for relative information: period of listing, number of security returns observations available, and divergence of analyst opinion.

Empirical investigations into the codetermination of security prices and economic events are called event studies. There are several ways of estimating the codetermination of interest. Since Fama, Fisher, Jensen, and Roll [8], it has been general practice to first translate variables into rates of return, then net out general market movements, and, finally, examine the relationship between residual returns and events. The methodology in all of its variants falls under the rubric of “residual analysis.”

The quadratic form of the covariance-co-skewness model by Kraus and Litzenberger and arbitrage pricing theory are used for an empirical investigation of market equilibrium with skewed seecurity returns. Empirical tests similar to the ones in Black-Jensen-Scholes and Gibbons are discussed. The empirical estimates give some support to the Kraus-Litzenberger hypothesis on skewness preference. However, there is some evidence that the tested arbitrage equilibrium is not a complete description of security pricing.

This paper demonstrates that the various market imperfections that have been suggested to explain observed portfolio choices and capital structures can be circumvented if securities (e.g., options) can be traded that simulate forward contracts on stock. It is shown that if the risk-adjusted returns to bondholders exceed the returns to stockholders (to reflect personal tax differences) tax-exempt investors will prefer a combination of these synthetic forward purchases and corporate bonds to purchasing stock directly. They will not, as has been suggested, include stock in their portfolios for diversification purposes when they can alternatively purchase securities that simulate forward contracts. It is also shown that firms that can sell synthetic forward positions on their own stock can essentially guarantee that sufficient funds will be available to meet their bond obligations. This gives firms the opportunity to increase their debt levels without increasing the possibility of bankruptcy and the corresponding administrative and agency costs.

Changes in the Japanese financial system over the coming decade will play a significant role in the functioning of U.S. financial markets and, indeed, of the entire U.S. economy. From World War II through at least the mid–1970s, the United States was a major exporter of investment capital in the form of foreign direct and portfolio investment. More recently, low U.S. savings rates, recurring federal budget deficits, reduced sovereign lending by U.S. banks, and, possibly, high real returns on domestic investment have combined to make the United States a major importer of capital. At the same time, large trade surpluses and very high savings rates in Japan have more than offset increases in government borrowing to make Japan the world's principal capital exporter, a position it is likely to hold for some time. These are fundamental changes.

This paper considers two aspects of the tendency for systematic risk to change during the period surrounding a firm-specific event. First, a statistic allowing for heteroskedasticity is presented as a means of more precisely testing for the incidence of structural change in the market model. Secondly, the bias resulting from the imposition of a single, arbitrary event period on every firm in a market efficiency study is formally demonstrated. Using a sample based upon stock splits, the switching regression technique of Quandt is then adapted to show that event intervals are more appropriately considered on a case-by-case basis. A comparison of alternative residual measures illustrates these procedures.

Miller has analyzed capital structure in the presence of both corporate and personal taxes. The present work investigates the effect of inflation on both interest rates and equity returns when the Miller equilibrium condition is employed in a loanable funds model. Both an interest rate effect and a redistribution effect are derived. The interest rate effect forces the responsiveness of the interest rate to the inflation rate to be below that hypothesized by Darby. However, the redistribution effect may change this responsiveness in either direction.

The parameters of the return process of a firm are determined by two elements—the natural event structure, i.e., the process by which nature affects the value of the firm, and the information structure, i.e., the process by which information about these events is collected and disseminated to investors. Simple measures of three dimensions of the information structure—the frequency and accuracy of, and the bias in information releases, are derived from the moments of the return distribution.

Daily cash forecasting generally requires some method to reflect day-of-month and day-of-week effects. It requires the resolution of multiple seasonals, a problem given scant treatment in the econometrics literature. This paper first presents multiplticative and mixed-effects specifications of day-of-month and day-of-week effects as alternatives to the additive specifications. Then, several important estimation issues pertinent to each specification are investigated, namely collinearity, holiday effects, length-of-month distortion, varying weekly-monthly pattern mix, and daily-monthly consistency.

The paper develops a broad class of distribution-based linear forecasting models in great generality similar to the way that Box and Jenkins [1] provide a broad class of time-series models that can be specialized via parameter selection (specification). In our case, parameter selection (specification) gives particular members of the linear class of distribution models. A particular version can be tested against an alternative specification via hypothesis tests on model parameters.

The purpose of this paper is to compare a variety of approximation techniques for valuing contingent contracts when analytic solutions do not exist. The comparison is made with respect to the differences in both the approximation theory and the efficiency of the computation algorithms. The focus of the computational comparison is upon binomial and finite difference methods applied to option valuation models with one stochastic variable. However, many of the results would generalize to pricing corporate securities, and also to certain aspects of problems involving multiple stochastic variables.

In this paper, we attempt to blend economic theory with an understanding of the historical context and regulation of Japanese financial markets, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s. The historical and regulatory context is critical since it represents the framework within which the economic forces operated. That is, we are interested in examining how a particular structure, characterized by controlled interest rates, segmentation of markets and functions, and limited entry, gave rise in understandable ways to distinctive corporate financial practices.

The unique characteristics of options enable investors to create nonnormal portfolio return distributions that cannot be replicated with other assets. This analysis explores the power of various investment selection criteria to identify efficient portfolios from investment strategies involving call options and treasury bills, stocks, and covered option writing. The preference structure for strategies incorporating options is compared to traditional stock-fixed income investments, and the importance of options to investor utility maximization is illustrated. This study reveals that rules of stochastic dominance that place few restrictions on investor preference functions and asset return distribution are appropriate criteria by which to rank portfolios containing options and other assets.

The large volume of government bonds issued since 1975 has been a strong driving force for structural change in the Japanese bond markets during the last decade. The increasing amount of outstanding government bonds has made the trading volume in the secondary market increase rapidly, accompanied with the development of interdealer trading.

This paper treats a problem of stochastic cash management under an average compensating-balance requirement. It develops a dynamic programming formulation of the problem in which the relevant state is a unidimensional quantity equivalent to the forecasted average balance at the end of the averaging period. Under usably broad conditions, it establishes the optimality of a transient policy of simple type, similar to the two-sided inventory type policy familiar from certain earlier studies of stationary cash balance problems having absolute balance requirements. The results apply to cases in which the transactions costs contain both fixed and proportional components. The paper discusses also a numerical example drawn from the literature of the cash balance problem and shows by simulation of the optimal (and simply modified forms of the optimal) policy, that good protection is afforded against negative balances, even though the model does not explicitly constrain the negative-balance probabilities.

This paper addresses both how best to incorporate forecasts of future excess market returns into a market-timing strategy and what additional return to expect as a consequence. In contrast to the work of Jensen [8] and Grant ([4], [5], and [6]), the results specifically consider and measure the attractiveness to a risk-averse investor of the positively skewed distribution of portfolio returns expected from a market-timed portfolio. The usual mean and variance characterization of a risky portfolio is not sufficient in the case of a markettimed portfolio, and a simple utility model is employed to measure the incremental value of a market-timing strategy. The results are given as a function of the relative volatility of the market, the quality of available forecasts, and the risk attitude of the investor.

This paper is an initial attempt to bridge the gap that presently exists between the theoretical and empirical literature on the instability of equity beta. We focus on two factors from the joint Option Pricing Model/Capital Asset Pricing Model framework—leverage and unexpected changes in the risk-free rate—which are hypothesized to influence the instability of equity beta across firms and over time. Using alternative variable parameter regression models, we find that highly leveraged firms exhibit greater equity beta instability than firms with lower leverage. Over time, equity betas exhibit greater instability during periods of large unexpected changes in the risk-free rate when compared to periods with small unexpected changes in the risk-free rate.