This study applies an option pricing model to empirically derive pension put values for a sample of 176 individual pension plan sponsors insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). This study finds that the pension put values for a group of 22 underfunded sponsors were significantly greater than the insurance premiums paid to the PBGC. On the other hand, for a group of 154 overfunded sponsors, the put values were also greater than the pension premiums paid to the PBGC, although the difference was not statistically significant. These findings suggest that underfunded plan sponsors are significantly undercharged by the PBGC, while overfunded plan sponsors are approximately fairly charged.

This paper studies the diversifiability of jumps in stock returns. It presents a multivariate time-series model of the stochastic process for an index and its component stocks that explicitly admits discrete common jumps. Maximum likelihood estimation for such a model is developed and applied to the daily Major Market Index and its component stocks for the period 1985 through 1990. The paper finds that Poisson-distributed jumps observed from both the index and its component stocks constitute nondiversifiable risk, implying that the standard assumption in option pricing that these jumps are not priced may be invalid.

It is well known that stock returns, on average, are negative on Mondays. Yet, it is less well known that this finding is substantially the consequence of returns in prior trading sessions. When Friday's return is negative, Monday's return is negative nearly 80 percent of the time with a mean return of −0.61 percent. When Friday's return is positive, the subsequent Monday's mean return is positive, 0.11 percent. This relationship is stronger than for any other pair of trading days and is most acute in small- and medium-size companies. The trading behavior of individual investors appears to be at least one factor contributing to this pattern. Individual investors are more active sellers of stock on Mondays, particularly following bad news in the market.

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.

This paper proposes and conducts direct tests of the mixture of distributions model for stock prices. By exploiting the model's bivariate conditional normality of price changes and trading volume, these restrictions can be tested under very weak assumptions regarding the daily flow of information to the market. As a technical byproduct, important parameters governing the distribution of this unobservable information flow are estimated.

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.

Monte Carlo procedures are used to compare the finite sample performance of several estimators that may be used in cross-sectional regressions with security abnormal returns as the dependent variable. Alternative models of event-induced increases in stock return variance are examined for the “event-clustering” scenario. Event clustering implies crosssectional correlation and heteroskedasticity in market model prediction errors, violating one of the fundamental ordinary least squares (OLS) assumptions (i.i.d. disturbances). Nonetheless, provided that the conditions for asymptotic validity derived by Greenwald (1983) are met, the OLS estimator is well specified in finite samples. Further, for sufficiently large cross sections there is no advantage to several other more complex estimators.

Using intraday data, we find that bank announcements of changes in the prime rate have significant effects on Dow Jones stock price indexes and yields in the Treasury bill futures market. We find comparable effects using daily data for indexes of share prices of banks and financial firms as well as interest rates on various maturities of government securities. Our evidence is consistent with the view that banks have a comparative advantage in processing private information gained through bank-borrower relations and the regulatory supervision process.

Empirical immunization studies have considered the efficacy of immunization strategies, in which the durations of assets and of liabilities are equated, against a strategy involving maturity matching. However, all these studies have ignored tax effects. In the presence of tax-clientele effects, immunization requires that the portfolio consists only of bonds that are correctly priced for a particular clientele. Testing for these effects, therefore, requires the identification of the correctly priced bonds for the investors in the clientele. However, since bond prices contain noise, determining these bonds is still an unresolved problem. Consequently, an empirical test of the magnitude of the error caused by ignoring taxes may be an impossible task in some markets, and indeed has never been conducted. The Canadian bond market provides perfect laboratory conditions for such a test. Tax-clientele effects are present in the Canadian market, and among the clienteles is a representative clientele. This paper examines the tax effects on immunization strategies. The results show that the error caused by ignoring tax effects is not negligible, and practitioners should use immunization with reference to tax effects.

This paper models the strategic pre-tender offer share acquisition problem faced by potential bidders in takeovers. The model provides a rational explanation for the seemingly anomalous empirical evidence that the information about the impending tender offers is not fully conveyed through the potential bidders' pre-tender offer trades and for the evidence that a large fraction of bidders do not hold any target shares prior to launching the tender offers. Additional testable implications are also provided.

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.

This paper empirically examines the underinvestment problem and the use of dividends to expropriate lenders' wealth. Rather than analyzing the market's reaction to potential wealthexpropriating events, a different aspect of potential conflicts of interest is addressed: do managers who control dividends act in a manner consistent with wealth expropriation? If so, then debt issues should be followed by increases in dividends. Two samples of firms are used: those issuing straight debt and those issuing convertible debt. The study finds no evidence that firms manipulate dividend policy to transfer wealth from the bondholders to stockholders. Two possible explanations are suggested. First, wealth expropriation may be a potential problem, but existing bond covenants restricting a firm's ability to pay dividends are effective. Second, firms may believe that reputation has greater value than what can be transferred from creditors in a one-time expropriation of wealth. Since the paper fails to find support for the covenant argument, it concludes that reputation is the most plausible explanation.

This paper provides further evidence of the holiday effect in stock returns and additional insight into the effect. This paper reports abnormally high returns on the trading day before holidays in all three of the major stock markets in the U.S.: the NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ. The holiday effect is also present in the U.K. and Japanese stock markets, even though each country has different holidays and institutional arrangements. This study finds that the holiday effects in the U.K. and Japanese stock markets are independent of the holiday effect in the U.S. stock market. Unlike the other seasonal patterns in stock returns, such as January and weekend effects, this investigation of size decile portfolios shows that the size effect is not present in mean returns on preholidays.