Many futures contracts contain a delivery option, which allows the short position a choice to deliver one of several varieties of a commodity. Several authors have argued that delivery options can have considerable value. For a forward contract with a delivery option, this paper shows that a continuously adjusted hedge will drive the value of the delivery option towards zero, assuming perfect and frictionless markets.

This paper develops a positive theory of trade credit based on its use as a financial response to deterministic variations in demand. The operating alternatives to trade credit, which include the use of storage or additional capacity, are modeled using results from the peak-load pricing literature. The paper shows that the extension of credit partitions the buyer's inventory cost and permits specialization at incurring the components of this cost. This specialization is economical when the seller has an advantage at incurring the financial cost and does not have an advantage at incurring the operating cost of accommodating variable demand. Conditions that provide these necessary and sufficient cost relationships are described. The paper also shows that a reduction in costs rather than an increase in revenues is the source of both the buyer's and seller's increase in wealth.

This study examines daily price reactions to initial reviews of securities by the Value Line Investment Survey. The reviews are found to convey information to the market as significant abnormal returns are found over a 3-day period around release of the information. Furthermore, there is no statistically significant subsequent price reation after this 3-day period, consistent with market efficiency.

This paper argues that an aggregate preferred habitat for investors exists on (or about) the last day of the calendar month, due to standardizations in the nation's payments system resulting in a concentrated flow of funds on this date. Thus, equilibrium yield discounts are predicted for securities maturing on such dates. Empirical tests on monthly and daily Treasury bill data support the principal hypothesis, as well as several ancillary hypotheses. The results have implications for Treasury debt management, for the short-term cash and debt management practices of businesses and banks, and for the empirical estimation of daily, weekly, or monthly return premiums on risky securities.

This paper presents evidence that the mean-adjusted returns and raw-market returns models are misspecified when the event under investigation occurs during either bull or bear markets. To demonstrate this phenomenon, simulation techniques as well as an actual event are employed to examine the reliability of four different return-generating models. When the event occurs during a bull (bear) market, both the mean-adjusted and raw-market returns models produce upwardly (downwardly) biased positive (negative) abnormal returns. This results in statistically significant cumulative abnormal returns over selected preevent and postevent intervals. In contrast, both the market-adjusted and single-index models show far less evidence of any unusual price activity over these same intervals.

This paper extends a recent study by Malatesta [14] on measuring abnormal performance using joint generalized least squares. For monthly data and a random sample of securities, Malatesta finds that there is little benefit in using more sophisticated econometric techniques to identify abnormal returns. The current study extends these results using a design that is more amenable to the benefits of the generalized methods and is consistent with actual event studies. Most notably, the study uses a sample of securities experiencing an actual event and tests both monthly and daily data. In addition, iterative techniques are compared to the ordinary least squares and estimated generalized least squares methods. The results of this study support the original conclusions of Malatesta, indicating no measurable gain in using any of the systems methods for event study applications.

This paper examines the effect of risk differences on the oft-documented negative relationship between stock returns and inflation. We find risk-related patterns of coefficients on our estimates of the level and change in expected inflation and on unexpected inflation. These patterns are consistent with the hypothesis developed in Fama [2] and in Geske and Roll [7] that future real output growth simultaneously helps to determine current stock returns and various measures of inflation.

The primary objective of this paper is to derive a multi-factor equilibrium model using a mean-variance approach. The results of this derivation provide greater insight into the nature of the resulting factors than does APT. There are several important implications for empirical tests of any a priori defined multi-factor model.

In this paper, we compare the robustness in application of the Gaussian assumption of security return distributions to the robustness of the general stable assumption. Using actual stock return data to simulate the “real world,” a stock market is constructed in which stock returns conform to a Gaussian distribution as well as to a stable Pareto-Levy distribution. Using these two sets of stock returns, efficient frontiers are generated under both assumptions of parametric environments. It is shown that the Gaussian assumption, and its incumbent statistical techniques, is preferable to the general stable assumption.

This paper reexamines and extends the work of Ben Horim and Levy [1], which argued that risk decomposition should be based on standard deviation rather than on variance. Their analysis showed that decomposition of variance is wrong when β < 0 and that, in general, this procedure produces incorrect estimates of undiversifiable risk. This paper shows that these conclusions also apply to the no-risk-free asset extended CAPM if risk is adjusted for the unavoidable risk associated with the global minimum variance portfolio.

We show that a well-diversified portfolio of randomly chosen stocks must include at least 30 stocks for a borrowing investor and 40 stocks for a lending investor. This contradicts the widely accepted notion that the benefits of diversification are virtually exhausted when a portfolio contains approximately 10 stocks. We also contrast our result with the levels of diversification found in studies of individuals' portfolios.

In this paper, tests are conducted for the presence of unit roots in the autoregression representation of foreign exchange currency futures price series. The results obtained from five different currency futures over the 1977–1983 period suggestthat foreign currency futures rates have autoregressive representations with a singleunit root (i.e., borderline nonstationarity). In view of this result, it appears thatthe process generating the natural logarithm of foreign currency futures rates may well be approximated by random walks.

Our paper extends prior work on abandonment and replacement policies by analyzing the effects of both the Darby and the Fisher interest rate hypotheses. In most of the new cases developed, the effect of increased inflation on economic life is ambiguous. In the abandonment problem, we find a greater tendency under the Fisher hypothesis than under the Darby hypothesis for increased inflation to result in an extension of economic life. In contrast, for the replacement problem, there is a greater tendency under the Fisher hypothesis (than under Darby) for inflation to shorten the asset holding period.

This paper demonstrates that the impact of the existing tax law is not uniform across projects with different variances of payoffs. A bias exists against projects with greater uncertainty of payoffs, which leads to an underinvestment in high risk projects. The bias against higher variance projects offers a theoretical justification for such tax incentives as the research and development tax credit.

This paper reviews previous and current research on the relation between price changes and trading volume in financial markets, and makes four contributions. First, two empirical relations are established: volume is positively related to the magnitude of the price change and, in equity markets, to the price change per se. Second, previous theoretical research on the price-volume relation is summarized and critiqued, and major insights are emphasized. Third, a simple model of the price-volume relation is proposed that is consistent with several seemingly unrelated or contradictory observations. And fourth, several directions for future research are identified.

This paper points out an error and implications of the error in the model of hedging effectiveness proposed by Howard and D'Antonio (1). The error would lead to ambiguous results if the model were used in practical applications to select the best hedging instrument. This paper proposes a new measure of hedging effectiveness that eliminates the error in the original model and resolves the ambiguity.