This paper develops a capital asset pricing theory in a market where noise traders interact with information traders. Noise traders are traders who commit cognitive errors while information traders are free of cognitive errors. The theory includes the determination of the mean-variance efficient frontier, the return on the market portfolio, the term structure, and option prices. The paper derives a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of price efficiency in the presence of noise traders and analyzes the effects of noise traders on price efficiency, volatility, return anomalies, volume, and noise trader survival.

This study considers a model in which a corporate manager has private information and engages in i) anonymous trading on personal account in the secondary market, and ii) the corporate issuance of new shares in the primary market. The paper examines the equilibrium tradeoff of insider trading profits against the manager's share of the corporate consequences of the primary issue. In the resulting equilibrium, managers, acting in their own best interests, seem to behave according to differing objective functions. In some cases, they seem to maximize intrinsic value, in others, insider trading profits seem to dominate, and still others seem to be concerned with both. Hence, the presence of anonymous trading around corporate financings brings into question the use of corporate objective functions with exogenously fixed weights.

A new testable implication is derived from the rational speculative bubbles model stating that the presence of bubbles implies positive duration dependence in runs of high returns. Specifically, the probability of observing an end to a run of high returns declines with the length of the run. Traditional duration dependence tests are adapted for use with discrete stock runs data and, consistent with the existence of bubbles, evidence of duration dependence in monthly real stock returns is found.

This article investigates differences in yields on identical Treasury notes and bills and shows that they reflect differences in liquidity (immediacy) risk and taxes. It proposes an empirical measure for differences in the liquidity risk of notes and bills: the volatility of the underlying rate times the ratio of bills' turnover to notes' turnover. Because differential taxes affect sellers but not buyers of bills and notes, the results reject, free of informational problems, the hypothesis that the notes' demand curve is horizonta. Note-bill yield differences also decrease with inventories of notes—the less liquid asset.

This paper empirically contrasts the Jensen Measure, the Positive Period Weighting Measure, developed in Grinblatt and Titman (1989b), and a measure developed from the Treynor-Mazuy (1966) quadratic regression on a sample of 279 mutual funds and 109 passive portfolios, using a variety of benchmark portfolios. The study finds that the measures generally yield similar inferences when using the same benchmark and that inferences can vary, even from the same measure, when using different benchmarks. This paper also analyzes the determinants of mutual fund performance. Tests of fund performance that employ fund characteristics, such as net asset value, load, expenses, portfolio turnover, and management fee are reported. These tests surprisingly suggest that turnover is significantly positively related to the ability of fund managers to earn abnormal returns.

This paper examines the relation between changes in firm value associated with public equityissue announcements and management ownership, nonmanagement large block ownership, institutional ownership, information variables, and leverage. A significant negative relationis found between the ratio of announcement period abnormal returns to changes in management ownership and the level of management ownership. This result is consistent with Stulz (1988) who predicts that firm value increases at a decreasing rate as management control of voting rights increases. This finding is also consistent with improvements in alignment of interests, where such improvements diminish as management becomes entrenched. The announcement period abnormal returns appear to be unrelated to outside blockholdings (large block ownership or institutional holdings), information variables, or leverage.

Signaling and agency cost theories of dividend policy predict that omissions will produce a larger average decline in equity values than will reductions of less than 100 percent. However, this paper identifies a U-shaped relation between announcement day risk-adjusted excess returns and the percentage decline in dividends. The significantly smaller than expected price reaction to dividend omissions cannot be traced to growth opportunities, nor to a tendency for firms to delay omission announcements. While omitting firms provide higher per share dividends within five years of the dividend action than do firms that severely reduce payments, future dividends are unrelated to the market's response.

The adoption of liability limitation provisions (LLPs) is associated with insignificant stock price reactions for all firms, but with positive stock price reactions for poorly performing firms. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that the net benefit of LLPs is larger for financially troubled firms than for other firms because outside directors are valuable to the distressed firm and LLPs substantially affect experts' expected costs of serving as directors of troubled firms.