Under the assumption that individuals are single-period maximizers of the expected utility of their future wealth, this essay extends the mean-variance security valuation model developed by Sharpe [10], Lintner [4, 5, and 6], and Mossin [7 and 8] to a general parameter-preference model, with and without the simplifications of homogeneous subjective probabilities and the existence of a risk-free security. Results with quadratic and cubic utility are developed as special cases.

Almost two decades ago, Markowitz [12] formulated the portfolio selection problem as a parametric quadratic programming problem. The crux of his formulation was the mean-variance assumption which asserted that a portfolio is efficient if (and only if): (1) it has less variance than any other feasible portfolio with the same return and (2) it has more return than any other feasible portfolio with the same variance.

A firm periodically makes three major classes of decisions that determine its structure as reflected on its balance sheet. The first relates to the total amount of investment as well as the distribution of this total amount among different types of assets. This decision determines the size of the firm and the structure of the “assets” side of its balance sheet. The second is concerned with the relative proportion of equity versus debt capital to be used in financing the firm. This decision determines the structure of the “sources” side of the balance sheet by establishing relative sizes of liabilities and stockholders' worth. The third is the choice of the proportion of the equity which should be raised through the retention of earnings and the proportion to be raised through the sale of new stock. This decision determines the dividends that will be distributed and the composition of the stockholders' worth portion of the balance sheet.

Over the years there has been a growing interest in the over-the-counter (OTC) trading of exchange-listed securities (known as the third market). Although the third market has flourished and its advantages have been expounded, it has not been possible to compare accurately the third market with organized exchanges because of an incomplete quotation system. On April 5, 1971, the National Association of Security Dealers Automatic Quotation (NASDAQ) system began including bid-and-ask quotations for 30 stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE); see Table 1.

In response to the suggestions of the editorial and reviewing staff of this journal, some additional explanation and extensions of the model presented in an earlier paper [4] seem desirable at this time. In that paper the investor in securities was assumed to have a utility function that depended on the first n moments of the statistical distribution of returns rather than just on the mean and variance. When the borrowing-lending possibility was introduced as in the Sharpe-Lintner model, the investor's perceived risk premium could be expressed in the higher moments' dimensions as well as in terms of the variance.

Most large companies develop formal or informal agreements with banks to cover anticipated seasonal or temporary cash needs and/or to provide assurance of the availability of funds against unanticipated cash requirements. We address the problem of determining the optimal limits of available funds a company should maintain under a revolving credit agreement. Typically a company will negotiate a legal commitment with a bank or group of banks for a specified period of time, usually one to three years, in which the bank agrees to extend credit up to a specified maximum amount. During the duration of the commitment, the bank must lend money to the company whenever the company wishes to borrow, provided the amount of money borrowed does not exceed the maximum amount noted in the agreement. The company must not be in default of any of the restrictive covenants of the agreement, such as working capital limits, compensating balances, limits on other indebtedness, etc. Although the agreement itself provides for intermediate-term financing, the agreement often takes the form of short-term (30-60-90 days) renewable notes.

The theory of efficient capital markets indicates that the prices in an efficient market fully reflect all available information. In much of the literature on efficient markets the term fully reflect is made operational with the assumption that the conditions for market equilibrium can be expressed as expected returns. Fama suggests that most expected return theories can be expressed in the following manner:

(1)

where — adopting Fama's notation — E is the expected value operator; Pjt is the price of security j at time t; Pj,t+1 is its price at t+1; is the one-period percentage return (Pj,t+1|Pjt); φt is a general symbol to represent whatever set of information is assumed to be fully reflected in the price at time t; and the tildes indicate that Pj,t+1 and rj,t+1 are random variables at t.

The evolution of corporate capital structure theory in the literature of finance has been marked by the development of an increasingly imaginative rendition of market processes under conditions of uncertainty. Trade-offs between debt and equity sources of financing, and their consequent impact on shareholder wealth, have been the major concern. While the evolution is by no means complete, the notion of an efficient capital market in which investor decisions are focused on security portfolio building activities has provided significant insights into the range of opportunities open to corporate management to enhance share valuation through enlightened financing decisions. One measure of the gap between theory and application, however, can be found in the topics which thus far have not been effectively comprehended in the literature, even though the analytical technology is clearly available. Among those topics is the question of convertible debt financing as a capital structure component. The treatment of such a funds source remains essentially in the realm of folklore, the typical story being that convertibles contain the “best elements” of both equity and straight debt or that they provide a vehicle for issuing equity at a “bonus” price higher than the current price. Closer examination reveals that either view is arrant nonsense, and it is to a demonstration of this point that the present paper is addressed.

Recent theoretical and empirical work in portfolio theory has exhibited a natural evolution from the two-moment EV model popularized by Markowitz through the higher moment models to selection on the basis of the entire probability function. This latter approach, referred to as the Stochastic Dominance (SD) approach to portfolio selection, has been shown to be theoretically superior to all of the “moment methods” and has been the focus of an increasing volume of empirical work.

In this study, an attempt is made to determine whether the profitability of a commercial bank is related to the bank's ownership-control status. Affiliated and unaffiliated commercial banks in the sample are found to be equiprofitable. Affiliation with a mutual savings bank does not generate differences in profits, total current operating revenues, or total current operating expenses between the two groups of commercial banks. Furthermore, the marginal net earnings or returns on the individual deposit types are the same for the two groups of banks.

The two groups of banks have extreme differences in their holdings of time and savings deposits and real estate loans. These differences between equiprofitable banks require further analysis. The affiliated commercial banks have significantly larger percentages of their total assets in nonearning assets and lower proportions in loans. The affiliated banks also have larger proportions of their deposits in the less costly demand deposits than do the unaffiliated banks. These results indicate that affiliated banks would have both lower revenues and expenses than do unaffiliated commercial banks, ceteris paribus. However, affiliated banks have larger proportions of their portfolios in the greater income-producing consumer and commercial loans.

In conclusion, profitability of the commercial banks in the sample is not affected by the banks' control status. The commercial banks controlled by mutual savings banks are as profitable as banks controlled by management or “independent” owners. However, the control status does effect significant differences in the balance sheet and income statement accounts. While many of these distinctions may result from differences in the banks' deposit structures, these differences themselves are consequences of affiliation.

In a recent article, Professors Stoll and Curley (hereinafter referred to as S–C) examined results for new issues during a short-run period and over long-run periods. The authors concluded that, “investors in new small issues floated under Regulation A in 1957, 1959, and 1963 experienced lower long-run rates of return than if they had invested in a portfolio of large stocks represented by the Standard and Poor's Industrial Average.” It was pointed out that these long-run results were consistent with the results of similar studies. Alternatively, regarding short-run results it was concluded that “in the short run, the stocks in the sample showed a remarkable price appreciation.” In fact, “short-run price appreciation was, however, considerably greater than the index appreciation.” They refer to this short-run performance as “.… perhaps the most interesting and certainly the most puzzling phenomenon encountered in the study.”

The majority of corporate bonds are callable before maturity at the option of the issuer. Unlike other security options (warrants, convertible bonds, etc.), the call provision cannot be resold; its value can be realized only by exercising it. The problem is to choose the optimal time to perform refunding (including the alternative of not refunding before maturity).

It is likely that warrants will be used increasingly in the future by corporations both as means of sweetening other securities such as preferred stocks and bonds, and as securities in their own right. Many authors have analyzed the characteristics of warrants from the point of view of investors but attempts to develop a procedure for determining the cost to a corporation of issuing warrants have been lacking. We will find it convenient to measure the yield to a corporation of issuing warrants instead of common stock, rather than determining the percentage cost of warrants analogous to the cost of common stock equity, preferred stock, and interest-bearing debt.

In their paper Messrs. Reilly and Slaughter set out two questions, namely:

1. Prior to the introduction of technological advance in the securities market was there any difference in the market making between the NYSE and OTC on a sample of 30 stocks?

2. Following that introduction what was the effect on the market making of these securities listed on the NYSE?

The authors clearly stated the basic economic theory that underlies this exchange of assets and the price setting mechanism, and then concentrated on the empirical study. Their findings are inconsistent with their a priori expectations. This empirical study is well done; the methodology is sound and well presented. However, the authors appear to have overlooked one vital aspect of this type of study, i.e., institutional effects. I shall concentrate upon this area.

A considerable amount of scholarly attention has been focused on the area of banking structure. There have been a number of studies of banking costs under differing market structures, with the goal of defining an economically “optimal” banking structure. A second major body of research has been directed at identifying the impact of given market structures on performance variables. Finally, a third group of analyses has sought an explanation of the process by which a specific structural phenomenon in banking develops and matures. It is within this third broad category of banking structure research that the results reported in this paper may be classified.

One of the most important innovations in bond financing and in mortgage lending has been the rapid adoption of variable-rate instruments in recent years. Notes and bonds bearing an interest rate between one and two percentage points above the prime rate are becoming common in corporate financing. Similarly, variable-rate mortgages (VRM's) with the interest rate tied to the deposit rate of S&L's or linked to the changing yields on competing investments have spread beyond Florida and California to many states. The Federal Home Loan Bank Board has recently endorsed the variable-rate concept and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation is preparing guidelines for secondary market operations in VRM's. Portfolio managers are thus taking note of the possibility of acquiring long-term instruments providing some of the resiliency of yields and a measure of real value protection characteristic of short-term issues.

Within the past decade, considerable progress has been made in measuring ex post portfolio performance. The two parameter risk-return dimension of investment performance as pioneered by Markowitz has been reduced to a single parameter which incorporates measures of both risk and return. Several different but related one-parameter measures of performance have been developed, notably by Sharpe [8], Treynor [11], and Jensen [3], and are commonly referred to as composite performance measures. Theoretically, the composite measures allow portfolios with different risks and returns to be compared directly.

Recent research focused on the market for first public offerings of common stock has indicated that investors who purchase new issues at the offering price will quickly achieve relatively large systematic profits. This is attributable to either the inability or the reluctance of investment bankers to reoffer the shares in which they deal at market-clearing prices. This paper examines factors that influence investment bankers in their pricing decisions and subsequently determine the short-run performance of new issues.

Louis Bachelier would be pleased with the findings reported in John T. Emery's paper, even though Bachelier wrote in 1900 before there was any popular support for technical analysis. Considering technical analysis historically, the Dow Theory was the first popular technical approach, although Charles H. Dow, editor of The Wall Street Journal at about the time of Bachelier's writing, did not consider his theory a forecasting method. Later William P. Hamilton began to forecast with Dow's Theory, and then in 1932 Robert Rhea's publication of The Dow Theory popularized this technical approach. Earlier Bachelier had struck the first blow of an obviously continuing quest to execute the technical security analysts. (A technical security analyst, often called a chartest, develops esoteric charts or computer printouts which he hopes will allow him to make better than average returns in the stock market.) In the United States serious economic and statistical testing of technical analysis did not begin until the early 1950s; these academic tests continue today. Test results support the efficient capital market theory or, put more bluntly, technical analysis does not lead to greater than average profits in the stock market. On the other hand, perhaps technical analysis does work, but no statistical method used in testing has uncovered this fact. In short, perhaps our statistical tools are not sophisticated enough to disclose the relation between stock price and “daily market indicators.”

Solving capital budgeting problems with linear and integer programming has been part of the finance literature for some time [21, 22, 23, 7, 14, and 18]. Capital budgeting problems have unique properties that distinguish them from other integer linear problems discussed in the mathematical programming literature. Capital budgeting problems generally have the following characteristics: (1) the matrix tends to be rectangular with more variables than constraints; (2) they are all maximization problems with ≤ constraints and nonnegativity conditions in the general form 0≤xi≤1 in the case of linear programming and xi = 0, 1 in the case of integer problems; and (3) there are often mutually exclusive projects among the variables. The purposes of this note are to illustrate some computational experience using existing integer algorithms to solve a set of capital budgeting problems and to begin to catalog the performance of integer codes on financial problems.