We construct a simple economy with consumption only at the final date in which we “endogenize” the stochastic behavior of prices assumed in the Black-Scholes model. Certain preferences (constant proportional risk aversion) and beliefs are shown to be sufficient and necessary, in certain respects, for the existence of such an equilibrium. The analysis is then generalized to a continuous-consumption framework, in which we embed the Merton proportional dividend model.

This paper presents new tests of the mixture of distributions hypothesis. Previous tests examined security prices and volume measured only at daily intervals. Here, differential implications of the hypothesis for transaction data are derived and tested. The new predictions emanate from the assumption that prices and volume evolve at uniform rates in transaction time. The results support this assumption and the mixture of distributions hypothesis in general. In addition, the tests suggest that the daily transaction-count may be a useful instrumental variable for estimating unobserved realizations of stochastic price variances.

This paper tests the hypothesis that option prices contain information not reflected in contemporaneous stock prices. An options transactions data base is used for the purpose. The evidence suggests that the magnitude of anticipation of stock prices by option prices is insufficient to overcome the bid/ask spread for intra-day holding periods. Implications of the profits in the overnight-holding periods are discussed.

This paper examines the effect of classifying a firm's equity or debt into subclasses of unequal seniority on the total expected tax burden of the firm and its security holders in a world with no agency and no bankruptcy costs. It is shown that, when positive income is taxed at a higher rate than that allowed on realized capital losses, expected taxes are minimized and the value of the firm is maximized if the firm has only one class of equity and, at most, one class of debt. This result helps to explain the common practice of issuing corporate bonds under open indentures. In fact, our empirical results indicate that before the advent of a differentiated capital gains tax in 1921, a great majority of publicly traded long-term industrial bonds were issued under closed indentures. By 1951, nearly all such debt was issued under single indentures (i.e., there was only one class of creditor).

The Monte Carlo method is used to solve for the price of a call when the variance is changing stochastically.

Using an intuitive approach that also provides new intuition concerning the Black and Scholes equation, this paper extends the results of Johnson and Stulz to the pricing of options on the minimum or the maximum of several risky assets.

A comparison of single and multifactor portfolio performance methodologies using Value Line and size-ranked portfolios indicates that although both methodologies provide unbiased estimates of portfolio performance, there are systematic differences in the power of the two methodologies. The predictive power of the multifactor methodology is superior for well-diversified portfolios but inferior for less diversified portfolios.

This paper employs recent developments in agency theory to study the impact that compensation contracts have on portfolio management investment decisions in a restricted mean-variance world. Two types of incentive contracts for mutual fund managers are analyzed and compared. The results show that the “symmetric” contract, while not necessarily eliminating agency costs, dominates the “bonus” contract in aligning the manager's interests with those of the investor.

This paper examines the associations between the adoption of a short-term compensation contract and changes in executive expenditure decisions for a sample of major commercial banks. In particular, the analysis concentrates primarily on changes in executive expenditures on discretionary items (expenditures preferred more by the manager than by shareholders). The results indicate that the adoption of a short-term compensation plan is associated with modest decreases in the ratio of discretionary expenditures to current operating revenue and the ratio of discretionary expenditures to managerial compensation for banks making the contractual change. These results are consistent with the conclusion that the mix of discretionary expenditures and effort selected by the manager changes with the adoption of a short-term compensation contract.

In this paper, we examine the pricing of European call options on stocks that have variance rates that change randomly. We study continuous time diffusion processes for the stock return and the standard deviation parameter, and we find that one must use the stock and two options to form a riskless hedge. The riskless hedge does not lead to a unique option pricing function because the random standard deviation is not a traded security. One must appeal to an equilibrium asset pricing model to derive a unique option pricing function. In general, the option price depends on the risk premium associated with the random standard deviation. We find that the problem can be simplified by assuming that volatility risk can be diversified away and that changes in volatility are uncorrelated with the stock return. The resulting solution is an integral of the Black-Scholes formula and the distribution function for the variance of the stock price. We show that accurate option prices can be computed via Monte Carlo simulations and we apply the model to a set of actual prices.

This paper tests the ability of the American option pricing model proposed by Parkinson [18] or Mason [14] to explain the pricing of the foreign currency options traded on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange from February 28, 1983 to March 26, 1985. We find that the model underprices out-of-the-money options relative to at-the-money and in-the-money options. This relative underpricing is driven by an underpricing of out-of-the-money call options of short maturity. In addition, the degree of relative mispricing for most categories of options is shown to be a decreasing function of the time to maturity of the options. Longer maturity options appear to trade at similar levels of implied volatility whether they are in, at, or out of the money. Most of these biases appear consistent with the fact that the underlying spot currency rate follows a mixed jump diffusion process as described in [17].

Most research dealing with portfolio selection under uncertain inflation is carried out by assuming either one of the following two approximations: a linear or a quadratic approximation. In this paper, we analyze the general case, namely assume that the nominal return is the product of the real return and one plus the rate of inflation. We demonstrate that the general analysis leads to the following results that are not found in the two approximations: (1) even if we assume that nominal returns are independent of inflation, the nominal and real efficient sets will not necessarily coincide. Mean-Variance (M-V) analysis leads to a nominal efficient set, that is, a subset of the real M-V efficient set, whereas the opposite holds assuming investors maximize expected utility of real wealth. (2) Similar results are obtained when real returns are independent of inflation (the Fisher hypothesis). Assuming normality of nominal returns, we derive the CAPM in real terms or its zero beta counterpart.

A popular hypothesis to explain the anomalous January returns of common stocks is based on the argument that there is considerable tax-loss selling by investors toward the end of the year. The purpose of this study is to test the tax-loss-selling hypothesis with data on Canadian stocks. Although the introduction of capital gains tax in Canada seems to have affected the behavior of stock returns, the findings do not support the proposition that taxinduced trading is the sole cause of the seasonality in stock returns in Canada.

Evidence provided here suggests that investors could have identified, ex ante, portfolios that hedge against uncertainty in the prices of three major categories of consumption: food, shelter, and transportation. This finding has implications for the practical importance of multi-period capital asset pricing theories that assume investors can identify such hedge portfolios. The study also provides some surprising evidence about the usefulness of common stocks and commodity futures contracts in hedging against specific price inflation. Certain combinations of common stocks serve as effective hedges, but combinations of commodity futures contracts contribute nothing to hedging ability.

This paper examines the demand for municipal bond insurance in the context of a competitive signaling equilibrium model. The study compares the pricing of new bond issues that are insured to similar issues that are not insured. The results indicate that issuers who purchase bond insurance, on average, are able to reduce their new issue borrowing cost more than enough to offset the cost of the insurance premium. Furthermore, the net benefit to the issuer increases as the underlying credit quality of the bond declines.

This paper derives and tests a new linear programming (LP) approach to bond portfolio management. The model elicits possible tax-clientele effects in the pricing of U.S. Government coupon bonds and simultaneously derives the optimal tax-specific bond portfolio. Analytically, the model derives these results by exploiting, for a given tax bracket, the price differential of an after-tax stream of cash flows. It accomplishes this objective by purchasing at the ask price “underpriced” bonds (for the specific tax bracket), while simultaneously selling at the bid price “overpriced” bonds. The model requires that the net cash flow, inclusive of purchased and sold bonds, be nonnegative at all future dates; the problem's formulation standardizes the position taken in each bond to a maximum of one unit. One of the model's appealing features is the parsimonious number of required calculations: only one LP program need be run per tax bracket. In addition to obtaining an “optimally” chosen tax-specific bond portfolio, the model also measures the after-tax term structure of spot U.S. Government interest rates for both tax-exempt and taxable investors. Finally, the superior monthly holding-period rates of return on the optimal taxspecific bond portfolio demonstrate an important property of the model's output.

Despite substantial debate, there has been little empirical analysis of the economic arguments concerning commercial bank expansion into securities activities. This paper uses the stock price response of commercial banking firms and securities firms to examine the risk and return effects of the announcement of bank entry into one such activity, discount brokerage. Our findings indicate that, while bank profitability and risk were largely unaffected by such entry, securities firms experienced a significant decline in market value. These results indicate that the objection of the securities industry to bank discount brokerage expansion was largely self-motivated and that bank safety and soundness would not be imperiled by such expansions.

This paper investigates the impact of managerial hedging on shareholder wealth when managers are able to choose the level of effort they expend in managing firms' investments. We demonstrate that shareholders will prefer managers to hedge observable unsystematic risks because they expect that this will induce managers to be more productive. We begin with the case where the risk being hedged is independent of managerial effort. In this case, we show that if shareholders are able to adjust incentive contracts either in anticipation of hedging or after observing hedging, but before managers expend effort, then they will benefit from that hedging. When the insurable risk is also dependent on managerial effort, then we have what we term an “embedded moral hazard” problem. In this case, the optimal contract may entail either over or under insurance by the manager, relative to that preferred by shareholders.

This paper tests the Value Additivity Principle (VAP) of financial assets with the pricing of Standard Oil securities in 1912. The results are somewhat mixed: the VAP does not generally describe the daily prices of equivalent Standard Oil portfolios, but it accurately describes their average market values; and the portfolio values display convergent adjustment behavior that tends to equalize them quite rapidly. On balance, these findings are consistent with the VAP.

This paper studies the impact of market consolidation or fragmentation on its performance, examining four alternative models of exchange: a consolidated clearing house, fragmented clearing houses, a monopoly dealer market, and an interdealer market. The effects of the market mechanism on the expected quantity traded, the price variance faced by individual traders, the quality of market price signals, the expected gains from trade, and the exchange implementation costs are studied.