The results obtained for accounts payable contrast with those for accounts receivable. With receivables, it appears that the level is determined more or less automatically by sales, linear trend, and season of the year. In the case of payables, it seems that trend and season are unimportant, and that the level of payables is determined instead by not only the level of purchases, but by capital requirements. Further, the current obligation on bank term-loans plays an important role in determining the response of payables to the need for working capital.

However, it was shown that fairly simple models are sufficient to account for most of the variance in accounts payable. Although it was anticipated that monetary variables would be significant for accounts payable, this was not borne out. As for accounts receivable, most of the variance in accounts payable for the Lumber and Wood Products Industry can be associated with microeconomic (i.e., industry variables) and time variables alone.

Several tentative conclusions concerning trade credit in the Lumber and Wood Products Industry may be listed:

1. Receivables can be accounted for almost entirely by sales, trend, or season.

2. Payables are not directly influenced by trend or season.

3. The direct influences of money supply and interest rates on accounts payable are not significant.

4. The effect of working capital on payables is adequately captured by treating current assets and current liabilities as separate independent variables.

5. The current obligation on long-term bank loans is more important in determining the level of payables than are short-term bank loans or the level of long-term debt.

This paper considers the capital structure and debt maturity choice for a value-maximizing corporation. In the model, interest expense is tax deductible, bankruptcy is costly, and debt is fairly priced at issue. In contrast to the results of Kane, Marcus, and McDonald (1985), optimal debt maturity does not always approach zero in the absence of transaction costs, and is increasing in the volatility of the assets of the firm. The model predicts a positive association between the value of leverage and total risk in some circumstances.

In this paper I examine the likelihood of CEO stock option repricing and its alternatives: namely, option grant, stock grant, and “do nothing.” Multinomial logit results suggest that firms reprice options to increase sensitivity of pay to stock price and to temper down sensitivity of pay to volatility. Moreover, repricing firms are younger and more concentrated in industries where human capital is important. Finally, I find no evidence that internal governance or executive conflicts of interest are relevant in explaining repricing. My results indicate that repricing is motivated by incentive alignment and retention, and not by agency cost considerations.

This article demonstrates that rating-based capital requirements, through their impact on insurers’ investment demand, affect corporate bond prices. Consistent with insurers’ low demand for investment-grade bonds with a rating close to noninvestment-grade, these bonds outperform. Consistent with insurers’ high (low) demand for investment-grade bonds with high (low) systematic risk exposure, these bonds underperform (outperform). Insurer demand, measured by insurer holdings, explains most of these pricing effects. We identify rating-based capital requirements as the driver of insurer demand, and thus the pricing effects, by showing that the effects do not exist before these requirements’ implementation in 1993.

Prior to the recent experience with relatively flexible exchange rates, there was much concern that a high degree of exchange-rate flexibility might somehow overburden the institutions of the foreign-exchange market, particularly the forward market, with disruptive consequences for international commerce. While seldom clearly stated, the reasoning underlying this concern usually proceeded along the following lines. Substantial exchange-rate flexibility would lead business management to expect greater exchange-rate variations, with the result that businesses would seek to cover much more of their foreign-exchange exposure (i.e., would seek to “insure” against the greater exchange-rate risk) by purchasing or selling foreign currency forward. However, foreign-exchange traders either could not accommodate this greatly increased demand for their services, or could accommodate it only at substantially higher cost. Consequently, business firms would significantly reduce the volume of their international transactions.

In the allocation of capital to investment projects, it is unlikely that optimal decisions will be reached unless anticipated inflation is embodied in the cash-flow estimates. Often, there is a tendency to assume that price levels remain unchanged throughout the life of the project. Frequently this assumption is imposed unknowingly; future cash flows are estimated simply on the basis of existing prices. However, a bias arises in that the cost-of-capital rate used as the acceptance criterion embodies an element attributable to anticipated inflation, while the cash-flow estimates do not. Although this bias may not be serious when there is modest inflation, it may become quite important in periods of high anticipated inflation. The purpose of this note is to investigate the nature of the bias and how it arises.

A necessary and sufficient condition for linear sharing rules to be Pareto optimal, as generally accepted by the finance community, is that utility functions be of the equicautious HARA class. We demonstrate that this condition is not necessary for a fixed distribution of initial endowments and derive the necessary and sufficient condition. We show examples of utility functions satisfying our conditions.

More frequent, larger, and more recent debt and equity issues in the prior 3 fiscal years are followed by lower stock returns in the subsequent year. The intercept of a q-factor calendar-time regression for the value-weighted (VW) portfolio of firms with at least 3 large issues is −0.63% per month (t-stat. = −4.31). Purging the factor returns of recent issuers increases the magnitude of the estimated underperformance following frequent equity issues. A VW Fama–MacBeth regression shows that firms with 3 equity issues underperform nonissuers by 0.65% per month (t-stat. = −2.65). Earnings announcement returns are low following frequent issues, especially equity issues.

Recent papers by Lamoureux and Poon (1987) and Brennan and Copeland (1988) document a significant permanent increase in average beta subsequent to stock split ex-dates. This paper demonstrates that the shift in estimated beta following ex-dates decays as the measurement interval is lengthened. There is no statistically significant difference between pre- and post-split betas using the Scholes-Williams (1977) estimator and weekly return data, or using monthly returns. We conclude that Lamoureux and Poon's and Brennan and Copeland's results can be attributed to a bias created by using too short a return measurement interval to estimate beta.

The importance of accounting information on security price determination is of interest to both security analysts and accountants. Beaver [3], Downes and Dyckman [6], Gonedes [12], Beaver and Manegold [4], and others have investigated the possible relationships between accounting information and market information. Rosenberg [26] has shown the existence of extra-market components of covariance in security returns while Simkowitz and Logue (S–L) [28] have derived the interdependent structure of security returns. However, none of this research has explicitly investigated how the empirical results can be affected by alternative accounting profitability measures within an industry simultaneously.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how multiple regression software may be used for computing estimates of efficient set parameters and for performing tests of mean-standard deviation efficiency. Regression software also is shown to be useful for selecting, from a set of assets, a subset that maximizes performance and for comparing the performance of the set to the subset. The underlying multiple regression model fitted by the software has no relation to the analysis; the regression software is employed simply as a computing device. Since the multiple regression procedure is familiar to most finance researchers and since regression software is commonly available, the techniques presented here should be of wide interest.

Using City of Oakland data during COVID-19, we document that small-business components of survival capabilities (i.e., revenue resiliency, labor flexibility, and committed costs) vary by firm size. Nonemployer businesses rely on low-cost structures to survive. Microbusinesses (1–5 employees) depend on 14% greater revenue resiliency. Enterprises (6–50 employees) use labor flexibility to survive but face 10%–20% higher residual closure risk from committed costs. The evidence argues for size targeting of financial support programs, including committed costs and revenue-based lending programs. Supporting the capabilities mapping, we find that the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) increased medium-run survival probability by 20.5% specifically for microbusinesses.

We develop a tractable dynamic model of an index option market maker with limited capital. We solve for the variance risk premium and option prices as a function of the asset dynamics and market maker option holdings and wealth. The market maker absorbs end users’ positive demand and requires a more negative variance risk premium when she incurs losses. We estimate the model using returns, options, and inventory and find that it performs well, especially during the financial crisis. The restrictions imposed by nested existing reduced-form stochastic-volatility models are strongly rejected in favor of the model with a market maker.

This study examines call option values implicit in U.S. corporate bonds from 1973 to 1994. The average call option value is 2.25% of par. Over time, call values remain close to zero until one year before the first call date, reach a maximum at the beginning of the callable period, and slowly decrease thereafter. The determinants of call values are examined. The results show that bonds of firms that have called aggressively in the past have larger call values. Additionally, lower interest rates, smaller slopes of the yield curve, and higher interest rate volatility lead to larger call values. The results also show that call values increase with time to maturity in the callable period but decrease with time to maturity in the call protection period. Lower rated, higher coupon bonds have larger call values. There is no evidence that the length of the call protection period affects call values.

We construct a model to illustrate the dynamics of cash-flow volatility (CFV) and firm valuation. As a firm progressively invests in its growth opportunities, its book value increases and catches up with its market value, reducing the valuation multiple (Q). CFV decreases because of the diversification effect of investing in more market segments. We document a positive CFV–Q association, which varies with firm size, investment opportunities, and the correlation across market segments. Empirical findings strongly support the model’s predictions and are robust to alternative explanations offered by extant studies on firm growth, volatility, and valuation.

This paper examines whether one of the most important participants in the takeover market, the institutional investors of target companies, suffers from the disposition effect and, if so, how this selling bias influences the takeover outcomes. I report robust evidence that target institutional investors are reluctant to realize losses. This bias further allows their sunk cost to affect both the takeover price and the deal success. My results are explained by neither the undervalued targets nor the 52-week-high price effect. They are most pronounced among targets whose investors have a strong propensity to hold on to loser stocks.

There is a large and growing literature on how to model the dynamics of the default-free term structure to fit the observed historical data. Much less is known about how best to model the dynamics of defaultable yield curves. This paper develops a class of defaultable term structure models that is tractable enough to be empirically implemented and flexible enough to capture some important behaviors of the credit spreads in the data. We compare two non-nested models within this class using a Bayesian estimation technique, which helps to solve the problem of latent state variables. The Bayesian approach also enables us to test the two non-nested models on the basis of the Bayes factor. The results strongly suggest that models with constant transition probabilities will not be able to fit the observed dynamics of inter-rating spreads.

Betting quotes provide valuable information on market-implied probabilities for outcomes of events such as elections or referendums, which may have an impact on exchange rates. We generate exchange-rate forecasts around such events based on a model that combines risk-neutral event probabilities implied from betting quotes with risk-neutral exchange-rate densities extracted from currency option prices. Its application to predict exchange rates around the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential elections shows that these forecasts, conditional on the respective outcomes, were accurate, and markets were able to separate their views on the likelihood and the impact of these events.

The past two decades have seen a proliferation of mathematically sophisticated portfolio selection models. Of these, the mean variance (MV), expected utility, and growth optimal (GO) models have received the bulk of attention.

We provide a new framework for valuing multidimensional real options where opportunities to exercise the option are generated by an exogenous Poisson process, which can be viewed as a liquidity constraint on decision times. This approach, which we call the Poisson optional stopping times (POST) method, finds the value function as a monotone sequence of lower bounds. In a case study, we demonstrate that the frequently used quasi-analytic method yields a suboptimal policy and an inaccurate value function. The proposed method is demonstrably correct, straightforward to implement, reliable in computation, and broadly applicable in analyzing multidimensional option-valuation problems.