The purpose of this paper is to describe a computerized classroom teaching tool for use in money and banking courses. A basic macroeconomic model and simulation program are introduced, along with classroom presentations and sample output. In addition, the technical details of the simulation, including operating costs, are explained.

Harry C. Friedman in his paper, “Real Estate Investment and Portfolio Theory,” has put his mind to an increasingly important area of financial concern, the relationship of real estate as a security in developing portfolio theory. Between now and the year 2000, it has been estimated that $1,500 billion will be spent on building and remodeling nonfarm housing. There will be an estimated $1,000 billion spent on commercial, industrial, and utility construction. In addition, $1,000 billion will probably be spent on public utilities and service institutions, plus $30 billion annually on community facilities. It is anticipated that each year in coming generations we will add to our existing inventory the equivalent of fifteen cities of 200,000 persons each. Predictions are that there will be a need for an additional 2 million dwelling units per year during the 1970's and that this need will climb steadily thereafter.

This article develops a criterion for comparing warrant financing with further common stock financing from the viewpoint of a firm's current stockholders. This criterion is then related to a complementary one presented by Bierman [1] and a condition is imposed on Bierman's cost of warrant financing for warrant financing to be preferred to further stock financing. Finally the article considers the limitations of these criteria and qualitatively discusses risk considerations that influence the attractiveness of warrant financing.

Modern contingent pricing theory (CPT) dates its genesis from the pioneering work of Arrow [1] and Debreu [9] in the context of complete markets. Beja [2, 3] demonstrated the application of contingent pricing concepts to incomplete markets. The approach has been applied to the valuation of options (Cox and Ross [7]; Rubinstein [30]) and a variety of other financial instruments (e.g., Ross [28])- Tne fundamental insight of CPT is that in arbitrage-free markets complex securities may always be viewed as additive combinations of simple “state-claims” having positive value which, in effect, pay off one unit if and only if a given state is attained at a given date. Concurrently, the continuoustime viewpoint pioneered by Black and Scholes [4] and Merton [22] has grown in significance. The basic simplification of the continuous-time approach is that relevant valuation quantities may all be expressed in terms of the first two moments, i.e., mean and variance, of the state variable distributions employed. When CPT adopts a continuous-time format, it has been shown (Garman [13]) that a basic differential equation holds for all securities; that differential equation involves, of course, the state-claim values, the distributional parameters of state variable evolution, and the prices and dividends of securities. Alternatively, somewhat stronger assumptions which lead to the existence of a rational consensus investor allow thedifferential equation to be expressed in terms of marginal utilities (Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross [8]). This paper applies the techniques of continuous-time CPT to the foreign exchange market. Since we wish to substantively treat inflationary and productive sources of risk in two countries, four state variables are necessarily involved. In a sense, therefore, this is an ambitious attempt since the mostcomplex continuous-time models to date (e.g.. Brennan and Schwartz [5]), have substantively treated only two state variables. Such complexity is simplified through the use of some compact notation, but not by the use of ad hoc modeling. Indeed, it should be emphasized that the present treatment is a full-equilibrium approach, and that while the compact quality of the notation might be made to incorporate a significant amount of possible additional structure, nothing here is inconsistent with a complete equilibrium.

The investment managers of financial institutions face a multiplicity of factors that influence the performance of fixed coupon securities in their investment portfolios. These factors can be classified under three headings:

1) Condition of the economy–changes in interest rate levels and spreads;

2) Nature of the financial institution–institution's tax rate, economic factors such as deposit variability and loan demand for banks, and premium inflow and benefit payments for insurance companies;

3) Characteristics of individual securities–(a) their attractiveness in terms of risk level and marketability; and (b) their contractual factors (coupon level and maturity) and tax status.

This is the first comprehensive study of the distribution of voting rights to shareholders. Only individuals owning stock on a record date may vote. Firms, however, reveal record dates after the fact 91% of the time. With controversial votes, firms are more likely to do the opposite, and this tendency is associated with a lower passage rate for shareholder-initiated proposals. The New York Stock Exchange sells nonpublic record-date information to select investors. When stocks go ex vote, prices decline and trading volume surges, suggesting that activist investors are buying marginal votes. These trends are most pronounced with controversial votes.

I study venture capital firms’ (VCs) use of public market information and how attention to this information relates to private market investment outcomes. I link web traffic to public filings hosted on EDGAR to individual VCs. VCs analyze public information about industry peers before most deals. An increase in industry filing views relates positively to the probability of an exit through acquisition, suggesting that public information helps identify paths to acquisition. The effect is stronger when the VC has less access to private information, especially for low-reputation VCs. Policymakers should consider spillover effects on private markets when setting public disclosure requirements.

Contrary to leading asset pricing theories, recent empirical evidence indicates that financial markets compensate only short-term equity variance risk. An equilibrium model with generalized disappointment aversion risk preferences and rare events reconciles salient features of the variance term structure. In addition, a calibration explains the variance and skew risk premiums in equity returns and the implied volatility skew of index options while capturing standard moments of fundamentals, equity returns, and the risk-free rate. The key intuition for the results stems from substantial countercyclical risk aversion induced by endogenous variation in the probability of disappointing events in consumption growth.

We test the signaling view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement using two complementary quasi-natural experiments that impose exogenous negative pressure on stock prices. Firms under such adverse price pressure increase CSR activities compared to otherwise similar firms. This effect concentrates among firms with stronger signaling incentives, namely, those facing greater information asymmetry, more product market competition, higher shareholder litigation risk, and higher stock price crash risk. Firms under the exogenous negative price pressure mainly improve CSR strengths, including costly environmental investments. We also find that CSR engagement attracts socially responsible investors and lowers the cost of capital for signaling firms.

This paper develops the parametric restrictions imposed on diffusion state processes by the requirement of arbitrage-free asset pricing. Using the equivalent martingale measure as a starting point, the diffusion property is exploited to specify the shadow pricing function, which takes conditional state variable probabilities under the reference measure into arbitrage-free contingent claim prices. The main results of the paper provide differential equations associated with the shadow price function that are used to identify restrictions on the parameters of assumed diffusion processes. The paper concludes with an application to the CIR model where the state variable, the instantaneous interest rate, is assumed to follow a square root process. Calculations are also provided for the parametric restrictions imposed on the Brownian bridge and OU state variable processes.

In their present paper. Professors Cheng and Deets (hereafter C-D) attempt to derive a measure of instantaneous systematic risk for securities and portfolios which is consistent with the Sharpe-Lintner-Mossin capital asset pricing model when the true market horizon is infinitesimally short. In so doing, they assert that Jensen's resolution of the horizon problem for such a market horizon is incorrect. In the comments which follow, I shall attempt first to indicate explicitly the causes for the differences in the Jensen and C–D results, and second, to evaluate their relative merits.

We investigate the Dead Hand Proxy Put, a contractual innovation in corporate debt agreements that may impact hedge fund activism. We find the provision principally in loans, not bonds, and provide evidence linking the adoption of the provision to hedge fund activism. Furthermore, controlling for endogeneity, we find that the provision significantly reduces the cost of loans. Bondholder wealth also increases. Moreover, cross-sectional analysis of share returns reveals that the provision is positively associated with repeat banking relationships and negatively associated with free cash flow problems, suggesting a cost-benefit tradeoff.

We empirically study the strategic behavior of levered firms in competitive and noncompetitive environments. We find that regulation induces firms to increase leverage, and this reduces their ability to compete when deregulation occurs. Large and small levered firms adopt different strategies upon deregulation. Whereas more levered small firms charge higher prices to increase margins at the expense of market shares, highly levered large firms prey on their rivals by increasing output and reducing prices to increase their market shares. The difference in their behavior is due to differences in their probability of bankruptcy and their financing constraints.

Time series techniques based on autocovariance and spectral analysis methods have often been used for statistical analyses of commodity and stock prices, with the usual conclusion that the prices, zt, are best described by a random walk:

where the errors, ut (alternatively called shocks or residuals), have zero expectation and form a sequence of independent random variables [5 and 8 ].

In a recent paper published in this journal [1], Bierman and Hass (BH) developed a model in which the risk differential that an investor would require to compensate him for the risk of default is stated as a function of the following variables: the probability of default on annual interest payments, (1-P1); the probability of default on the principal payment at the end of the maturity of the bond, (1-P2); the default-free rate, i, and the maturity, N.

Professor Melicher has conducted an interesting study of the effects of financial factors on beta coefficients and their variations. He reduced the perennial multicollinearity problem by using a factor analysis to screen the financial variables used in the statistical analysis. This study is another in the growing body of literature concerned with beta coefficients as measures of risk. My comments on this paper will consider separately (1) the research design (i.e., what the study directly covered), and (2) the inferences drawn by the author versus what the beta coefficients and their variation really do measure.

In recent years, large commercial banks in the United States have turned to so-called “liability management” as a way to acquire additional funds. The use of Certificates of Deposit (CD's), Eurodollar balances, debentures, and recently the issuing of commercial paper through their holding companies represent an extension of the more traditional secondary reserve asset management approach to bank liquidity and reserve adjustment.

This paper presents a descriptive theory of risk that may be applied to capital budgeting decisions. The proposed theory is actually much more general than a theory of financial risk and is consistent with reported laboratory experiments. The essential feature of this theory is the role that risk descriptively plays as a constraint in the decision-making process. Specifically, risk is modeled as a chance constraint such that projects are rejected if the probability of “failure” is larger than some prescribed level. This has the effect of making all investment decisions chance-constrained programming problems, although some classes of problems have trivial solution procedures. In this context, risk serves to “strike out” or eliminate alternatives from consideration.

It has been suggested that information has the three following uses:

1. Information can be employed to earn trading profits.

2. Information can improve the operating decisions of a firm or group of firms and thereby increase the stock price.

3. Information can reduce the risk of a firm or group of firms and thereby increase the stock price.

The capital asset pricing model of Sharpe [39], Lintner [28], and Mossin [33] has been the basis for many theoretical and empirical studies in capital markets. One criticism of the model hasbeen directed at the assumption that investors optimize in a one-period framework. Fama [7] and Merton [30] have shown that the results of this one-period optimization model are consistent with the results for an intertemporal optimization model if the investment opportunity set is constant over time. Specifically, the relevant parameters for the distributions of risky securities (i.e., conditional means and variances) must be constant over time. Merton has argued that this is a restrictive assumption, but there has been very little empirical evidence to suggest that changes in the investment opportunity set are significant.