investor preference for large firms new evidence on economies of size in the last several decades industrial organization literature has been replete with studies demonstrating a systematic relationship between accounting rates of return and firm size in the direction of greater and more stable accounting profits for larger firms these studies have been subject to criticism for an alarming number of statistical and conceptual problems the most important of which alleges a serious bias in accounting profit measures as proxies for economic profit 2 the criticisms have resulted in a stalemate in the interpretation of empirical evidence on firm size and performance nevertheless there is continued interest in the area ostensibly resulting from policy concerns with large firm advantages in both product and capital markets this paper provides new evidence concerning the industrial organization literature controversy of the connection between firm size and performance stock market data are used to examine the relationship between capital market returns risk and firm size the findings suggest that even if there were no advantages of large size in the product market equal rates of operating profit large firms would still have a substantial capital raising advantage over small firms this advantage is unrelated to the widely recognized floatation cost economies even after controlling for nondiversifiable risk using the capital asset pricing model capm investors still demonstrate a statistically significant and economically important preference for the securities of larger firms investors apparently place a premium on large firms which is not attributable to large firms observed lower risk as captured by the widely used measure of nondiversifiable risk beta risk this finding a fresh contribution to the

the impact of minimum trading units on stock value and price volatility we study how minimum trading unit changes on the tel aviv stock exchange impact a stock s trading activity price volatility and value the value effects are consistent with merton s 1987 model i e an increase in the investor base trading volume and a decrease in price noisiness affect stock value positively our results extend amihud mendelson and uno s 1999 tests of merton by demonstrating a clear relation between price noisiness changes and stock value changes and by showing that the response to a minimum trading unit decrease becomes less favorable and arguably even negative in the thinnest trading stocks

entry propensity the supply of entrants and the spatial distribution of business units beesley m e and hamilton r t 1994 entry propensity the supply of entrants and the spatial distribution of business units reg studies 28 233 239 an extensive new database is used in the estimation of models explaining entry propensities across the cross section of british manufacturing industries few previous studies of industrial entry have adequately incorporated the supply of prospective entrants this is redressed here by allowing for the possibility that prospective business founders are industry specific with their numbers varying among industries the spatial distribution of business units within an industry is also shown to have an important bearing on entry an effect which also appears to have been overlooked in previous studies beesley m e et hamilton r t 1994 la propension a se faire immatriculer le nombre d immatriculations et la distribution spatiale des unites industrielles reg studies 28 233 239 on se sert d une nouvelle base de donnees plus etendue pour estimer des

the asset pricing effects of fixed holding costs an upper bound the capital asset pricing model predicts that investors will hold diversified portfolios but many households actually hold very few assets the paper examines the asset pricing implications of one possible explanation for this phenomenon fixed costs of holding assets while earlier authors found the exact asset pricing effects of such costs in single period models under restrictive assumptions i derive a general upper bound on these effects that is also valid in continuous time illustrative calculations reveal that large holding costs must be postulated to generate significant asset pricing effects

multiple experiments for the causal link between the quantity and quality of children this article presents evidence on the child quantity child quality trade off using quasi experimental variation due to twin births and preferences for a mixed sibling sex composition as well as ethnic differences in the effects of these variables our sample includes groups with very high fertility an innovation in our econometric approach is the juxtaposition of results from multiple instrumental variables strategies capturing the effects of fertility over different ranges for different sorts of people to increase precision we develop an estimator that combines different instrument sets across partially overlapping parity specific subsamples our results are remarkably consistent in showing no evidence of a quantity quality trade off

dynamic market models in industrial organization abstract this paper surveys empirical work done on dynamic models of market performance these fall into one of two categories structural models which model how market structure and performance change in response to entry and reduced form models which describe change regardless of how it is brought about a typical example of each type of model is chosen from the literature and simulations are used to draw out the implications of the estimated coefficients both models depict the competitive process in the us economy as being extremely slow

entry in greek manufacturing industry athens vs the rest of greece the paper reports an attempt to estimate the determinants of entry in greek manufacturing industry in the 1984 87 period and to identify the differences between locatio nal entry preferences entry in athens is found to be hesitant with respect to factors such as profitability and increased competition conversely entry in the rest of the country is strongly related to expected profits and safe markets negatively affected by relative labour costs and indifferent to international competition threats the healthier approach of regional entry is enhancing regional development prospects and partly justifies the strict regional policies of the 1980s

teen motherhood and abortion access it is argued that the net effect of any restriction of abortion access on birth rates is an empirical question this study examines the impact of access to abortion on county teenage birth rates birth rates are expected to decrease by 1 among white adolescents aged 15 19 years for a 25 mile increase in the distance to the nearest abortion provider particularly among in wedlock births data are obtained from 1973 88 national natality local area summary files for counties in the us and four other national sources data did not provide useful information on the empirical relationship between access and birth rate for densely populated urban areas cross sectional findings that had omitted variable bias indicate that an increase of 25 miles in distance to a provider was associated with an additional 1 4 births per 1000 white teenage women or a 3 increase in the average teen birth rate of 45 1000 white teenagers the findings from a county fixed effects model that controlled for omitted variable bias indicate that an increase of 25 miles was associated with a reduction in teen births of 0 5 1000 or about 1 of the mean birth rate both medicaid restrictions and parental consent laws were negative and significant and more negative in poor and more isolated counties the state year effects models did not change findings on distance and medicaid restriction effects the effects of changes in timing of laws suggests that laws followed preexisting trends changes in distance to provider were primarily in the first 2 years following the change out of wedlock births were unaffected by changes in distance to providers the out of wedlock teen birth rate increased with a complete ban on abortions fewer wanted births were associated with small restrictions findings imply that closing of clinics during 1977 88 had an impact on teen birth rates of under one tenth of 1 the 20 increase in teen births was unexplained

spatial variations in new manufacturing plant openings some empirical evidence from greece fotopoulos g and spence n 1999 spatial variations in new manufacturing plant openings some empirical evidence from greece reg studies 33 219 229 this research deals with the determinants of regional variation in new plant openings in greek manufacturing industries over the period 1980 91 key findings of this first detailed attempt to do so in a greek context relate to the significant direct effects of regional specialization the extent of local production links and investment in public infrastructure on new manufacturing activity confirming research findings in other countries the results obtained here indicate small firm presence the local supply of skilled labour and wealth and labour productivity differentials across regions to be significant and positive influences on new firm formation fotopoulos g et spence n 1999 la variation geographique de la creation d entreprises industrielles quelques preuves empiriques provenant de la grece reg studies 33 219 229 cet article traite

naive versus optimal diversification tail risk and performance it is well documented in portfolio optimization that naive diversification outperforms optimal mean variance diversification because the latter is subject to severe estimation error our study provides an alternative explanation for the outperformance of naive diversification by examining the tail risk of naive diversification relative to optimal mean variance diversification we utilize a rolling sample approach and compare the out of sample performance and tail risk of various optimal strategies to that of the naive diversification strategy using portfolios consisting of individual stocks we show that for portfolios containing relatively small number of stocks naive diversification outperforms optimal mean variance diversification and is less exposed to tail risk however for relatively large number of stocks in the portfolio naive diversification maintains its superior performance but increases tail risk and results in more concave portfolio returns these results imply that the outperformance of naive diversification acts as compensation for the increase in tail risk and concavity

wealth and portfolio composition theory and evidence we examine a survey of 6010 u s households and estimate a model for household portfolio allocation we extend the conventional portfolio choice model in order to capture the observed incompleteness of household portfolios we show that the empirical specification of the joint discrete and continuous choice that characterizes household portfolio behavior is a switching regressions model with endogenous switching we go on to examine the impact of taxes on portfolio composition using detailed survey data to calculate precisely the marginal tax rate facing each household finally we estimate wealth elasticities of demand for a range of assets and liabilities

an analysis of bank risk and deposit rate ceilings abstract the effect of deposit rate regulation on bank solvency is an important and unresolved issue that has received only limited attention in this paper capital market data is used to assess changes in both systematic and non systematic risk of a portfolio of bank stocks at the time of deposit rate deregulation the evidence indicates that neither measure of capital market risk is significantly affected leading to the conclusion that bank solvency risk will not be increased by the deregulation of interest rates on deposits

taxes and transaction costs in asset market equilibrium abstract this paper examines the effects of capital taxation in an imperfect capital market in which acquiring risky assets incurs costs individual portfolio choice has two distinct aspects the extensive choice of which assets to hold in the portfolio and the intensive choice of what fraction of wealth to invest in each asset held the traditional assumption of zero transaction costs obscures the extensive choice this paper shows that if trading in assets is costly capital taxes have extensive effects as well as the intensive effects previously studied

farm real estate pricing under risk an empirical investigation the rapid increase in farm real estate prices during the last three decades has heightened interest among agricultural economists in explaining this phenomenon even prior to the 1950s several researchers expressed concern that farm real estate prices were increasing at a faster rate than could be justified by farm income 29 technological change and government programs were evaluated for structural changes in price determination 6 13 other important explanatory variables were farm enlargement and urbanization influences 34 more recently harris and nehring 11 lee and rask 18 harris 10 and boehlje and griffin 3 explored the effects of such factors as farm size inflation and government price supports on farm real estate prices while previous research contributed to understanding farm real estate price determination several important questions remain unanswered how is the farm real estate market linked to other capital markets heady and tweeten 12 and later reynolds and timmons 30 used rate of return on common stock as an explanatory variable in their farm real estate price models however their approaches are based more on intuitive reasoning than on rigorous theoretical development how does risk affect farm real estate prices the fact that real estate is a risky investment generally was ignored in previous research 2 441 4 recently harris 10 and boehlje and griffin 3 included risk information in their analyses of factors affecting bid prices for land these studies use strong microfoundations that are not intended to directly reflect risk related linkages with other markets or sectors these issues can be addressed conceptually through capital market theory the purpose of this paper is to explore farm real estate price determination in the context of capital market theory to determine the relationship between the farm real estate

what is the economic cost of the investment home bias overinvesting domestically is well known as an investment home bias ihb we define an economic home bias ehb whereby the ihb measures the investment weights and the ehb measures the economic cost induced by the ihb we may have a large ihb and a negligible ehb with the increase in the average correlation between foreign markets from 0 4 for the decade ending in 1988 to about 0 9 for more recent decades the u s ehb is becoming negligible despite the domestic investment of 77 5 since 2009 the correlations have decreased indicating that the hb puzzle is emerging once again

on optimal production and the market to book ratio given limited shareholder diversification our purpose is to examine a firm s optimal output decision and valuation when its shareholders hold a limited number of risky assets the primary theoretical result indicates that the market to book ratio is a function of the degree of shareholder diversification our theory suggests a negative relationship between a firm s market to book ratio and shareholder diversification

the theory and reality of urban slums pathways out of poverty or cul de sacs this article explores two contrasting perspectives on the role of informal settlements in urban labour markets one proposes that they help to lift households out of rural poverty and onto a path to prosperity through affordable access to urban opportunities the other suggests that the debilitating conditions confine residents to enduring hardship and insecurity south africa is an important test case because of the extent of social and spatial inequalities and the policy ambivalence towards shack settlements preliminary evidence indicates that employment rates are much closer to formal urban areas than to rural areas but conditions of employment are noticeably worse other forms of data are required to assess the magnitude and timescale of economic progression for households

keeping up with the joneses and optimal diversification abstract peer effects have been shown to affect behavior and can generally lead to investments choices that are mean variance inefficient this paper analyzes optimal diversification with peer effects we show that if individuals have keeping up with the joneses preferences and they take their peer group reference as the market portfolio markowitz s mean variance efficiency analysis and the capm equilibrium are intact this holds for any keeping up preferences as well as heterogeneous combinations of such preferences these results also extend to the merton levy segmented market model

on diversification given asymmetry in returns complete diversification is the rational investment strategy for a risk averse individual in a homogeneous securities market who considers only the first two moments of return observed behavior of market participants however demonstrates that the majority of individual investors hold imperfectly diversified portfolios the purpose of the present study is to examine one potential cause for this behavior which does not rely on imperfection in the capital market specifically we show that given the existence of and investor preference for positive skewness a rational investor may hold an optimal limited number of homogeneous risk assets the relationship between the number of risk assets in a portfolio and the total risk of the portfolio has been examined extensively both theoretically and empirically 7 8 16 the general conclusion from these analyses which are set in a mean variance framework is that adding randomly selected and equally weighted risk assets to a portfolio will reduce total risk without affecting return the implication for risk averse investors in a perfect market is that complete diversification is optimal observed behavior of market participants however demonstrates that the majority of individual investors hold imperfectly diversified portfolios in the wharton survey of 1975 in 4 the median number of stocks held was found to be fewer than 4 with 34 percent of the investors holding no more than 2 stocks the two primary studies providing evidence of the undiversified portfolios of individual investors are blume and friend 3 and blume friend and crockett 5 the former analysis was based on a sample of individual income tax returns from 1971 and indicated that considering only dividend paying stocks 34 15 percent of investors sampled held only one stock 50 51 percent held no more than 2 stocks and only 10 72 percent held 10 or more stocks the latter study which included nondividend paying stocks was based on the federal reserve board s 1962 survey of the financial characteristics of consumers the median number of holdings per household was 2 while the average was 3 41 in both 3 and 5 numerous other measures of diversification were employed with the results confirming the conclusion that individual investors are on average highly undiversified the principal theoretical reasons advanced by the authors of these studies relate to the relaxation of assumptions of the standard capital asset

entry barriers exit and sunk costs an analysis the relationship between entry rates entry barriers and sunk costs are examined across a set of four digit industry data results indicate that product differentiation barriers reduce entry rates and sunk capital costs reduce exit rates whether entry and exit are truly simultaneous however is not clear

housing markets in third world cities research and policy into the 1990s abstract a review of analyses of urban housing markets is timely to suggest directions for research and policy in the next decade the neoclassical approach to housing economics is contrasted with a political economy framework with respect to the production or supply of housing and consumption or demand an argument is advanced for increased attention to the analysis of citywide housing markets using insights from both theoretical approaches and for research into processes of exchange such analyses should form the basis for policies which focus neither on selected income groups or residential areas in isolation from wider housing market processes nor on housing output targets but primarily on ensuring the provision of essential inputs

access to abortion investments in neonatal health and sex selection evidence from nepal the impact of abortion reforms on the human capital of subsequent generations including health has been documented in several developed countries however i evidence relative to the impact on health in early life is not unanimous ii there is no evidence for a developing country where health human capital is low and iii existing econometric studies have been unable to disentangle the effect of abortion reform on individual behavior from that on the composition of mothers in this paper i exploit variation in the timing and location of newly introduced legal abortion centers in nepal to estimate the effect of reducing the psychological and nancial cost of abortion on fertility investments in prenatal care neonatal mortality and sex selection consistent with the prediction that the opening of a legal abortion center nearby reduces the cost of abortion i find that the probability of a live birth conditional on conception decreases by 8 3 percentage points 9 percent of the mean for a given mother similarly the unconditional monthly probability of a live birth decreases by 0 4 percentage points 21 percent of the mean however there is no evidence that improved access to abortion increases observed investments in antenatal care and little evidence that it increases unobserved investments in neonatal health contrary to ndings in lin et al 2008 for taiwan abortion reform in nepal does not appear to have led to sex selective terminations on the contrary there is some evidence that it may have led to a decrease in sex selective abortion which could be due to the substitution of first trimester legal abortions to illegal abortions at a later gestational stage

the supply of birth control methods education and fertility evidence from romania abstract this paper investigates the effect of the supply of birth control methods on fertility behavior by examining romania s 23 year period of pronatalist policies following the lifting of the restrictions in 1989 the immediate decrease in fertility was 30 percent women who spent most of their reproductive years under the restrictive regime experienced increases in life cycle fertility of about 0 5 children less educated women had bigger increases infertility after policy implementation and larger fertility decreases following the lifting of restrictions these findings suggest that access to abortion and birth control are significant determinants of fertility levels particularly for less educated women

market reaction to quarterly earnings announcements a stochastic dominance based test of market efficiency the use of the capm in empirical research is subject to some criticism in light of this criticism the stochastic dominance criteria are offered as an alternative research method for the examination of market efficiency the underlying assumptions of the two frameworks are discussed and the stochastic dominance technique is demonstrated via the examination of market reaction to quarterly earnings announcements during the 24 quarters commencing with october 1962 the findings are compared to those of watts watts r the time series behavior of quarterly earnings unpublished paper university of newcastle newcastle n s w 1975 quoted in watts 1978 who utilized the same data base in contrast to watts conclusion our analysis suggests that the market was efficient during the entire period examined and that no significant differences in market behavior between the first and the second 12 month periods was evident the discord may be attributed to the relative effectiveness of the two analytical tool

life in a slum understanding living conditions in nairobi s slums across time and space this paper overviews the role of slums in urban africa focusing on nairobi it reveals the characteristics of slums and how these have changed over time spatially disaggregated data show that slum areas are very dense with poor quality buildings lacking access to key services such as sewage disposal and electricity however improvements to building quality public service provision and socio economic characteristics are mostly outpacing those seen in the formal sector measures such as child health and school attendance have caught up or are on pace to catch up in the near future with the formal sector while improvements in building quality and service provision are advancing more slowly we find significant heterogeneity across the city and in particular that central slums look to be stuck with low quality buildings and poor service provision though not with low socio economic indicators we explore potential explanations for why slums located on highly prized land near the centre may be stuck with poor infrastructure

what factors inspire the high entry flow in taiwan s manufacturing industries a count entry model approach why is the entry flow of the manufacturing sector extremely high in taiwan and does it contribute to the prevailing entrepreneurship this article aims to explore what factors inspire potential entrants to go into an industry based on a theoretical formulation of the poisson probability entry model a count data model is employed to investigate the determinants of entry flows the empirical results reveal that traditional entry barriers indeed lower the entry flow the entry incentives including price cost margin and industry growth play a lesser role at attracting new firms while alternatively the market size acts as a better proxy of an entry incentive in explaining entry flows incumbents responses to entry r d and advertising intensity are found to be associated with a significant negative impact on entry flows this article also finds that there is a higher bound of covariate of entry about 10 that can be attributed to the immeasurable personality of entrepreneurs entrepreneurship rather b

the stability of joint ventures reciprocity and competitive rivalry the focus of the following empirical analysis is the influence of reciprocity and long term relationships on the stability of joint ventures these cooperative incentives are offset by industry structural conditions which may promote competitive rivalry among the partners to separate these effects on joint venture survival the hypothesized relationships are proxied by variables drawn from industry and questionnaire data and estimated under a hazard model specification a theoretical implication of the findings is to suggest a shift of attention from the transaction to the economic relationship as the unit of analysis copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

risk and capital asset prices abstract this paper is an empirical examination of the statistical significance of the residual variance of individual assets as compared with the covariance of returns with various market portfolio proxies in predicting expected return the data and analysis we present suggest that measures of covariance are no more significant than residual variance in predicting expected return in this sense our paper is not supportive of the sharpe lintner or black versions of the capital asset pricing model

capital asset prices with and without negative holdings prize lecture to the memory of alfred nobel december 7 1990 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

squatters rights and urban development an economic perspective up to 35 per cent of urban dwellers in third world cities are squatters the characteristics of the squatting phenomenon are both varied and puzzling of particular interest are the observations that 1 landowners often do not collect rent from squatters for use of the land and 2 costly evictions are sometimes used without subsequent development of the land which in many cases is resettled by squatters we present an economic model of landowner squatter interaction which is consistent with these observations this model is then used to enlighten certain aspects of socially optimal land management policy for squatter areas the phenomenon of squatting in third world cities is widespread and growing recent studies have shown that up to 35 per cent of the total urban population of developing countries lives in squatter settlements the current and mostly non economic literature has mixed views regarding whether squatting is a problem or a solution to efficient urbanization attitudes concerning squatter settlements range from disgust concerning living conditions in such illegal or quasi illegal spontaneous settlements to admiration for the resourcefulness of the inhabitants as they provide themselves with at least some shelter using the minimal inputs available the literature has consequently not provided a useful conceptual framework to guide government policy in this paper we develop a formal economic model to understand the various forms of squatting in third world cities we then use the model to address some vexing policy questions do private landowners evict squatters too frequently or too infrequently should any or all squatters be evicted should they be provided with basic infrastructure services should they be given unambiguous property rights to the land they occupy applying the coase theorem to the squatting problem we might conclude that the observed rate of evictions was just right evictions occur only if the value of land use to squatters is less than the sum of the alternative development value to the landowner plus the cost of evictions this economic logic follows since squatters would outbid any competing use of the land if indeed they valued it more thus any policy that gave more property rights to squatters would be a pure transfer from landowners to squatters social welfare would be unaffected however transaction and bargaining costs associated with the transfer of ownership of land to squatters which are likely to be important in the squatting problem can invalidate this simple intuition 2 landowners incur costs when they try to enforce property rights either by collecting rent or evicting collect ing rent formalizes the relationship between renter and landowner the land owner would then have to incur the costs of providing basic services water

the pricing of risky assets on the belgian stock market abstract this paper presents the first empirical examination of the relationship between the average return and the risk of a comprehensive sample of 200 securities which traded continuously from 1966 to 1980 on the brussels stock exchange a relatively thin equity market based on our empirical findings we cannot reject the hypothesis that the pricing of common stocks on the brussels stock exchange conforms to the capital asset pricing model

fertility household size and poverty in nepal population control policies keep attracting attention by increasing the household size having more children would directly contribute to a household s poverty using nationally representative household level data from nepal we investigate the links between a household s fertility decisions and variations in their size and composition we show that the relationship between number of births and household size is positive when the mothers are young but becomes negative as the mothers grow older elderly couples who had fewer children host on average more relatives who are outside the immediate family unit this result sheds light on the heterogeneous relation between the number of children and household size over the life cycle it also implies that reductions in a household s fertility may have an ambiguous impact on its per capita consumption which depends on how the household s composition responds to new births and changes over time in this sample an old household s per capita consumption is not affected by the number of births we use the gender of the first born child to instrument the total number of consecutive children

abortion legalization and child living circumstances who is the marginal child weexaminethe impact ofincreased abortion availabilityon the averageliving standards of children through a selection effect would the marginal child whowas not born have grown up in different circumstances than the average child we use variation in the timing of abortion legalization across states to answer this question cohorts born after legalized abortion experienced a signiecant reduction in a number of adverse outcomes we end that the marginal child would have been 40 60 percent more likely to live in a single parent family to live in poverty to receive welfare and to die as an infant access to abortion is one of the most contentious public policy issues facing the united states today the period since the legalization of abortion under the roe v wade decision of 1973 has been marked by incessant debate over the appropriate government enancing and legal status of abortions meanwhile pregnancy resolution through abortion is a very common outcome in the united states roughly 25 percent of all pregnancies are aborted ventura et al 1995 as a result major changes in abortion access could have substantial effects on the birthrate indeed levine staiger kane and zimmerman end that the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s led to an 8 percent reduction in the birthrate 1

risk in banking and capital regulation this paper investigates the role of bank capital regulation in risk control it is known that banks choose portfolios of higher risk because of inefficiently priced deposit insurance bank capital regulation is a way to redress this bias toward risk utilizing the mean variance model the following results are shown a the use of simple capital ratios in regulation is an ineffective means to bound the insolvency risk of banks b as a solution to problems of the capital ratio regulation the theoretically correct risk weights under the risk based capital plan are explicitly derived and c the theoretically correct risk weights are restrictions on asset composition which alters the optimal portfolio choice of banking firms the recent increase in bank failures especially after the 1980 and 1982 deregulatory acts has again ignited a controversy over the risk portfolio of the banking industry given the importance of this sector there has been increased scrutiny of the industry s motives for risk taking and possible regulatory changes to improve its stability these investigations have centered around two rather complementary areas the first of these is the role of deposit insurance and how its current pricing procedure encourages risk taking and justifies current bank regulations the works of buser chen and kane 4 kane 9 and benston et al 2 have made substantive contributions the authors demonstrates the way in which our current fixed rate insurance system rewards risk taking by the firm and insulates it through deposit insurance from the market discipline that needs to exist to ensure proper risk evaluation this realization has led these authors to propose a series of regulatory changes to encourage proper portfolio choice within the industry these include a shift to market value accounting risk based deposit insurance premiums and additional capital regulation the last of these serves as a method of coinsurance whereby higher capital levels require the bank to absorb greater losses in the event of failure and encourage additional prudence in management in essense it is one method of risk reduction that may offset the risk preference imposed on the industry due to the inappropriate insurance pricing because the amount of capital influences the probability of bank insolvency and thus the soundness of the entire banking system the regulators ceteris paribus prefer more capital to

arbitrage with fixed costs and interest rate models in this paper we study securities market models with fixed costs we characterize the absence of arbitrage opportunities and we provide fair pricing rules we then apply these results to extend some popular interest rate and option pricing models which present arbitrage opportunities in the absence of fixed costs in particular we prove that the quite striking result obtained by dybvig ingersoll and ross 1996 which asserts that under the assumption of absence of arbitrage long zero coupon rates can never fall is no longer true in models with fixed costs even arbitrarily small ones for instance models where the long term rate follows a diffusion process are arbitrage free in the presence of fixed costs including arbitrarily small ones we also rationalize models with partially absorbing or reflecting barriers on the price processes in particular we propose a version of the cox ingersoll and ross 1985 model which as in longstaff 1992 produces yield curves with realistic humps but does not assume an absorbing barrier for the short term rate this is made possible by the presence of even arbitrarily small fixed costs

the heterogeneous investment horizon and the capital asset pricing model theory and implications this paper generalizes the risk return relationship implied by the traditional capital asset pricing model with finite investment horizons it examines the effect of heterogeneous investment horizons on the functional form of capital asset pricing and proposes a translog model for estimating the risk return relationship in addition this paper contends that some empirical findings that are inconsistent with the traditional capm have resulted from misspecification of the capm by ignoring the discrepancy between the observed data periods and the true investment horizons finally the paper shows that under various conditions the translog model is a suitable function for estimating the relationship between risk and expected returns

determinants of the variance in market shares in canadian manufacturing commonly used measures of industrial concentration can be expressed as functions of the number of firms in an industry and a measure of firm size inequality prior studies of the causes of industrial concentration have emphasized factors affecting the number of firms in an industry we expand the study of causes of concentration by examining factors which affect the variance in market shares as a measure of firm size inequality

turbulence in growing and declining industries turbulence over the industry life cycle is examined for the case of portugal using the lowest possible level of industry aggregation thus allowing for the use of panel data to study the evolution of product markets replacement of exiting firms by subsequent entrants plays a primary role in generating turbulence in high growth markets while displacement of incumbents by recent entrants is the main selection force in declining markets as the industry life cycle progresses trial and error entry and entry mistakes decrease and turbulence subsides

the capital asset pricing model theory and empiricism in a recent breakthrough article richard roll i977 has shown that the value of the huge amount of empirical research which has attempted to verify the sharpe lintner capital asset pricing model capm is open to question briefly roll claims that if all the empirical investigators were to take a meanvariance efficient portfolio as the market portfolio they would get in the sample a perfect linear relationship between average security returns and betas in what is commonly known as the second pass cross section regression this perfect linear relationship is tautological it neither proves nor disproves the capm theory it is a technical result obtainable by straightforward algebra without making any assumption regarding the investors preference it is interesting to mention that in another paper published in 1977 stephen ross makes the same argument with regards to the capm and the efficiency of the market portfolio in his words the efficiency of the market portfolio and the capm are equivalent see ross i 977 p 178 the purpose of this paper is to show that empirical evidence and the investigation of investor behaviour lends support to a rejection of the capm theory in its presentform a revised formulation of the capm developed by levy i 978 provides a more suitable theoretical model in the reformulated capm the systematic risk beta plays in most cases only a negligible role in measuring the security s risk in section i we sketch a different prooof of what we consider to be roll s basic claim this proof contributes no additional theoretical results beyond what is given by roll i977 appendix corollary 6 but it is simple very short and uses no matrix algebra in section ii we derive a number of sample efficient sets and demonstrate that all efficient portfolios include short positions such results can be interpreted in one of the following alternative ways a sample variations cause this result but the capm holds and no such results would be obtained if we employed ex ante rather than ex post parameters b the empirical results are not entirely attributed to sample variations and they indeed contradict the capm in its present form since the motives for taking a short position can be explained by strong positive correlations between rates of return of various stocks e g general motors and ford we believe that this co movement of prices prevails ex post as well as

international corporate diversification market valuation and size adjusted evidence errunza and senbet es 7 analyze the effects of international operations on the market value of the firm both at theoretical and empirical levels the theoretical model which is largely heuristic exploits the costly supply adjustment of multinational firms mncs in providing international portfolio diversification services to investors who face differential cost barriers to direct holdings of assets across national boundaries mncs compete as financial intermediaries to undo the barriers so that in equilibrium profits are driven out mncs and pure domestic firms sell at an equivalent risk adjusted return however costly financial intermediation and the associated relative efficiency leads to a positive valuation effect for mncs relative to purely domestic firms further the equilibrium analysis implies that demand side investor barriers to international capital flows alone are inconsequential to the valuation of mncs in their pure financial role but that the interaction with the supply side costs are necessary to produce a valuation effect at the corporate level es subject the theory to an empirical analysis in a value based approach by employing a variant of tobin s 17 qratio the analysis controlling for industrial market power suggests that the relationship between the excess valuation and the degree of international involvement doi has magnified over periods characterized by severe u s government controls vis a vis the more recent periods in this paper we formalize the theoretical argument by viewing indirect portfolio diversification by mncs as a means of completing the international capital market we employ a paradigm in the unanimity literature and formally characterize the equilibrium in which there is a rationale for mnc financial intermediation we then perform an expanded empirical study by employing generalized least squares and maximum likelihood procedures since the positive relationship between excess valuation and doi as suggested in es 7 might be attributed to the so called small firm or size and the p e effects the test methodology controls for such effects also the traditional literature has relied upon foreign sales percentage as a proxy for doi in view of the well recognized limitations of this proxy we employ four different measures of international

risk return and equilibrium an extension this study extends a recent empirical reexamination of the risk ret urn relationship by examining the possibility that an omitted size re lationship may account for the anomalous results h levy s generaliz ed capital asset pricing model provides the theoretical basis for incorporating the impact of firm size on expected return by examining the relative importance of unsystematic risk in pricing closely held securities compared to pricing widely held securities in so doing the empirical analysis also provides a test of an implication of the generalized capital asset pricing model two methodologies are used t o test the hypotheses empirically the results indicate that even thou gh size has a significant impact on the risk return relationship it apparently does not account for the anomalous results this implicati on is consistent under both methodologies copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

specialization versus diversification as a venture capital investment strategy abstract much important work has informed us of rates of return earned by venture capitalists the importance of venture capitalists to the going public process and the criteria venture capitalists use to evaluate deals this paper seeks to add to the literature by testing hypotheses based upon both the finance and strategic management literature regarding certain venture capitalist investment practices venture capitalists seek to control or manage risk driscoll 1974 macmillan siegel and subbanarasimha 1985 financing structure and investment strategy provide several means for venture capitalists to do this tools available to the venture capitalist include portfolio diversification to spread risk across different industries firms or hot cold ipo markets to minimize unsystematic or investment specific risk information sharing networking and specialization can also be used to control unsystematic risk several hypotheses are developed from these conflicting perspectives data used to test the hypotheses are derived from responses to a survey of venture capitalists three hundred surveys were mailed to venture capitalists 98 or 32 7 returned usable responses portfolio diversification is a well known means to control risk exposure by reducing unsystematic or specific risks however bygrave 1987 1988 as well as financial intermediation theorists argues that maintaining a high degree of specialization is useful for controlling risk as well as for gaining access to networks information and deal flow from other venture investors the analyses of this paper build upon bygrave s work we construct more rigorous tests to resolve the conflict between the diversification and information sharing hypotheses our hypothesis tests were usually resolved in favor of the information sharing view for example venture capitalists in the sample that were heavily involved in seed round financing were diversified across fewer numbers of firms and industries further evidence in favor of information sharing is seen in investment patterns across different financing stages diversification would imply maintaining a portfolio of investments across the different investment stages the information sharing specialization view would argue that it is best to stay focused on a single stage or several connected stages the empirical evidence from the sample once again favors the specialization perspective this research provides information of use to venture capitalists as they seek information on how best to control risk to entrepreneurs as they learn of the factors venture capitalists consider in determining their investment strategy and to academicians as such studies provide insight to general industry practice and thus help to form the basis of classroom discussion and future research endeavors

contraception as development new evidence from family planning in colombia there has been considerable debate in the last decade about whether or not family planning programmes in developing countries reduce fertility or improve socio economic outcomes this article provides new evidence by studying the expansion of one of the worlds oldest and largest family planning organisations profamilia of colombia it finds that family planning explains less than 10 of colombias fertility decline during its demographic transition as in wealthy countries however lowering the costs of first birth postponement produced important socio economic gains enabling young women to obtain more education and to work more and live independently later in life

transaction costs and the pricing of assets the existence of transaction costs explains why investors do not fully diversify their portfolios this paper examines the implications of such limited diversification oi equilibrium asset prices in the framework of the capital asset pricing model in the pricing equation obtained here an asset s risk premium depends on a weighted average of its covariance with the market and its own variance the absence of transaction costs in the sharpe lintner capital asset pricing model capm is often claimed to be only a minor idealization which hardly affects the substantive implications of the model this paper aims to demonstrate that this is not the case incorporating transaction costs into the capm leads to a major reformulation of its basic asset pricing equation in contrast with the capm formula

slum real estate the low quality high price puzzle in nairobi s slum rental market and its implications for theory and practice summary this study of 1755 households in nairobi s slums challenges the conventional belief that slums offer low quality low cost shelter to a population that cannot afford better standards in nairobi slums provide low quality but high cost shelter although slum residents pay millions of dollars in rents annually and better quality units command higher rents very little is being re invested to upgrade quality to resolve the challenge that the nairobi puzzle poses for theory and practice we develop a new analytical framework for understanding quality of living conditions improving conditions in nairobi s slums requires we argue two simultaneous interventions alteration of the tenure mix to enhance owner occupancy and infrastructure investment

squatters or tenants the commercialization of unauthorized housing in nairobi abstract the conventional view of squatting suggests that the squatter builds his own house in this paper we shall present fieldwork data from nairobi which is totally at variance with this view we shall present data on a private rental sector albeit illegal that is operating in such squatting areas in particular we shall investigate its growth profitability and ownership together with the characteristics of the landlords and tenants involved we shall suggest that the provision of low income shelter is now a commercial activity

a simple algorithm for optimal portfolio selection with fixed transaction costs the general optimal portfolio selection problem with fixed transaction costs is a complex mathematical programming problem however by placing reasonable restrictions on the variance covariance matrix of returns it is possible to simplify the solution of the problem specifically if the structure of returns between securities is such that the pairwise correlation coefficients are approximately the same a fairly simple algorithm which requires little computational effort can be employed this method can also be extended to the case where changes in the information set necessitate a revision of an existing portfolio

does idiosyncratic risk really matter goyal and santa clara 2003 find a significantly positive relation between the equalweighted average stock volatility and the value weighted portfolio returns on the nyse amex nasdaq stocks for the period of 1963 08 to 1999 12 we show that this result is driven by small stocks traded on the nasdaq and is in part due to a liquidity premium in addition their result does not hold for the extended sample of 1963 08 to 2001 12 and for the nyse amex and nyse stocks more importantly we find no evidence of a significant link between the value weighted portfolio returns and the median and value weighted average stock volatility the intertemporal relation between risk and return has long been an important topic in asset pricing literature most asset pricing models postulate a positive relationship between a stock portfolio s expected returns and risk which is often modeled by the variance or standard deviation of the portfolio s returns however there is no agreement about the existence of such a trade off for stock market indices 1 while return volatility is an intuitively appealing measure of risk different approaches used by previous researchers suggest that no clear consensus has emerged regarding its relevance 2 whether or not investors require a larger risk premium on average for investing in a security during times when the security is more risky remains an open question

volatility and time varying risk premiums in the stock market the stock returns generating process is analysed using alternative specifications of the autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model empirical anaylysis using monthly data from the finnish stock market shows a clearly significant persistence of volatility of stock prices in addition the presence of a time varying risk premium in the stock returns is also clearly supported by the data this suggests a cautious attitude towards traditional standard empirical analysis of capital markets which is based on the assumption of time invariant risk premiums the results obtained do not support the view that the risk premiums have increased during the 1980s when instability has been the main characteristic of most financial markets

measuring industrial disequilibria economists have expended enormous amounts of energy thought and computer time investigating the various and subtle relationships between market structure and performance since these investigations engender important public policy implications the correct measurement and specification of variables such as profits concentration economies of scale and advertising have stirred much controversy and debate by specialists in the field in a process which hopefully iterates towards agreement however the frequent inclusion of one variable in most regression specifications has been almost entirely devoid of discussion the variable in question is usually referred to as an indicator of disequilibrium and is most often measured as growth in sales over some arbitrary time interval one need only look at a few past issues of this or numerous other journals to find papers using regressions with price cost margins or profit rates as the dependent variable and a growth in sales variable based on the last two five or ten years as one of the independent variables this paper attempts to begin filling this lacuna by examining measures of disequilibrium in a coherent fashion to preview the results somewhat i find that growth in sales particularly if it is based on a period of more than three or four years is not a good measure of disequilibrium per se this might explain the seemingly inconsistent impact of sales growth in the many studies measuring growth in sales for arbitrary time periods often exceeding five years however while i argue that other superior measures of disequilibrium per se can be constructed growth in sales possesses the attribute of distinguishing between excess demand and excess supply disequilibria a trait not found in the superior measures of disequilibrium and one which is most important in regressions where profits are used as the dependent variable thus growth in sales based on two or three years only emerges as the best proxy for disequilibrium in these regressions in the process of examining measures of disequilibrium several other interesting and potentially important findings emerge first i am able to directly examine the hypothesis that many of the measured relationships between profits and market structure were actually

computing equilibrium prices for a capital asset pricing model with heterogeneous beliefs and margin requirement constraints abstract the mean variance capital asset pricing model capm is a useful mathematical tool for studying a variety of financial problems in contrast to existing work in the literature which has primarily focused on deriving analytical solutions under restrictive assumptions we propose a numerical algorithm for efficiently computing the set of equilibrium prices of a capm model with heterogeneous investors and arbitrary margin requirements we present the mathematical formulation of the capm model derive structural properties of the portfolio selection and excess demand functions and establish the asymptotic convergence of the proposed algorithm under mild conditions to illustrate the utility of the algorithm we perform sensitivity analysis on a simple example to study the impact of marginal requirements and interest rates on the resulting equilibrium prices numerical studies are also carried out to compare the performance of the algorithm with that of two other popular methods namely the fixed point method and the brand and bound algorithm

small firm entry in us manufacturing a cross section empirical analysis examining the entry behavior of small firms is provided in this paper while the authors find that certain traditional market structure characteristics and entry barriers have a strong impact on small firm entry behavior the reliance upon innovative strategy by small firms also explains a significant amount of the variation in the pattern of entry by small firms they conclude that small firm entry is at least partially determined by entry barriers industry specific characteristics facilitating retaliatory conduct by incumbent firms and the reliance upon innovative strategy by small firms copyright 1989 by the london school of economics and political science

bank funding modes securitization versus deposits abstract we examine a bank s choice of whether to fund the loans it originates by emitting deposits or to sell the loans to investors with common knowledge of loan quality and laissez faire banking we find that the choice is irrelevant with asymmetric information but without government intervention we find that better quality assets will be sold securitized and poorer quality assets will be funded with deposits public regulation can influence the bank s choice subsidies can cause a bank to favor deposit funding but mutual funds and third party insurers may mitigate the effects of governmental subsidies

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

the effect of medicaid abortion funding restrictions on abortions pregnancies and births this paper considers whether state medicaid abortion funding restrictions affect the likelihood of getting pregnant having an abortion and bearing a child we exploit a natural experiment afforded by supreme court decisions and employ more traditional multivariate models with alternative fixed effect specifications an analysis of 12 years of state level data indicate that restrictions are associated with a reduction in abortions and either no change or a reduction in births implying fewer pregnancies subsequent analysis of the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy is consistent with these findings and show the response is concentrated among the low income population

the economic determinants of the market reaction to proposed mandatory accounting changes in the oil and gas industry a cross sectional analysis abstract this paper examines the economic reasons for the observed negative abnormal common stock performance of firms whose reported earnings and stockholders equity were negatively affected by the proposed elimination of full cost accounting in the oil and gas industry four explanations of the market effects of this mandatory accounting change are examined 1 naive investor theory 2 modified naive investor theory 3 contracting cost theory and 4 estimation risk theory these hypotheses are developed in detail and used to generate variables for a cross sectional model which explains observed return behavior the effect of the accounting change on total stockholder s equity the existence of financial contracts denominated in terms of accounting numbers and to a lesser extent firm size are shown to be important explanatory variables the importance of these variables is consistent with both the contracting cost and estimation risk theories

returns to farm real estate revisited barry s research on farm real estate returns suggests that when farm assets are viewed as a part of the nation s wealth portfolio returns are not persistently low as is commonly asserted in policy debates this paper extends barry s research by explicitly accounting for the effects of uncertain inflation using a broader market proxy and lengthening the sample period the results suggest farm real estate offers only slight not substantial premiums above those for systematic risk contributes little systematic risk to a well diversified portfolio and exhibits substantial risk due to uncertain inflation

more possessions more worry abstract a common wisdom asserts that the wider the universe of assets to choose from the greater the investor s welfare we show that this is not the case in practice where parameters have to be estimated even when the estimates are unbiased surprisingly risk aversion plays a crucial role corresponding to the desirability of asset expansion by dividing investors in three groups investors with very low risk tolerance and investors with very high risk tolerance are better off with asset expansion and investors with moderate risk tolerance are worse off despite the option to refrain from investing in the additional asset

the determinants of smes market share in 1991 taiwan manufacturers small and medium sized enterprises smes have become increasingly popular in recent decades having caused concern among scholars of various areas our line of research focuses on the determinants of smes market share this study explores the topic base on taiwan s manufacturers data collected in 1991 our empirical results indicate that taiwan has witnessed smes becoming prosperous in manufacturing industries with higher relative labor productivity low entry barriers prosperous subcontracting activities and young ages our results indicate that in the transitory process of industrial development taiwan s smes no longer can afford high wage payments when at the same time the quality of labor does not increase accordingly as taiwan approaches the status of a developed economy the beneficiaries of export activities have changed unlike 1986 in 1991 there was a smaller share of smes in taiwan s export oriented industries furthermore smes benefited from their efforts to increase their automation status the emphasis on issues concerning environmental protection proved to be another source of entry barrier that kept smes from prospering certain similarities arise when comparing our conclusions with those of the u s canada germany and japan all of whom represent industrialized countries we can conclude that as taiwan matures in her industrial development process smes also struggle to a certain maturity in theirs

entry and exit from manufacturing industries symmetry turbulence and simultaneity some empirical evidence from greek manufacturing industries 1982 1988 the interdependence between entry and exit of firms into manufacturing industries is the focus of this research when both entry and exit equations are estimated separately the results support the existence of strong symmetry in their determinants when however entry and exit are estimated within a simultaneous equation framework the empirical evidence does not offer sufficient grounds to support the notion that entry and exit are simultaneously linked instead it seems that they are two contemporaneously related processes which respond in like fashion to the structural characteristics found in particular industries their linked response is also extended to factors unaccounted for by the individual entry and exit formulations and this expresses itself in significant contemporaneous correlation between the entry and exit equation residuals the change in the identities of firms operating implied by the positive correlation between entry and exit may then be attributed to industry turbulent condition