The stock market is in the midst of an era of change unparalleled since the Great Depression, long-standing institutions — including the major stock exchanges — are being radically challenged by contemporary developments, and novel approaches to making markets for common stocks are appearing with increasing frequency. In addition, the Martin Report and the recent hearings of the Securities and Exchange Commission on the future structure of the equities market indicate that the regulatory climate surrounding the stock market can be expected to undergo serious change in the near future.

Since World War II, the significance of the municipal bond market has increased dramatically with state and local government debt growing much more rapidly than public and private debt, federal debt, or the gross national product. Between 1960 and 1970, the annual value of new issues of state and local government bonds increased 110 percent, and there is every indication that the total will continue its rapid rise. In 1969 and 1970, the values of state and local government bond new issues were second only to those of the corporate bond market. Despite the size of the state and local bond market, investors and researchers have devoted their attention to the markets for corporate and U.S. government securities; the interest in these markets has tended to overshadow activity in the municipal bond market.

Many recent studies of the demand for financial assets have been of an aggregative nature, using time-series data. However, some efforts to disaggregate and rely more heavily on cross-sectional data have yielded substantial improvements in discovering relationships not evident due to aggregation. The purpose of this paper is to continue in this spirit of disaggregation and to estimate the demand for one homogeneous type of financial asset, credit union shares, on a cross-sectional basis.

For almost a decade, Myron Gordon has argued repeatedly that an enterprise's dividend policy can affect its share price [2, 3, and 4]. The essence of his argument is that risk-averse investors are likely to perceive current dividends as less risky than future ones. Consequently, a corporate decision to reduce current, in favor of increased future, dividends will reduce share prices, even when the funds are invested to yield the firm's cost of capital.

Studies [1, 3, 4, 5] pertaining to the relationship between a firm's cost of capital and the debt component of its capital structure have been implicitly assuming the equivalent-risk class hypothesis to be true. According to the hypothesis, firms belonging to the same industry group do not exhibit significant differences in regard to business risk and can, therefore, be treated as belonging to an equivalent risk class. The validity of this hypothesis, as borne out by the research of Wippern [8] and, later, of Gonedes [2], has become questionable. The purpose of the present paper is to replicate the test carried out by Gonedes with a set of sampled data from Indian industries. A brief review of the two existing studies is given below.

The recent studies of Fisher and Lorie [10 and 11], Brigham and Pappas [2], and others have contributed significantly to our knowledge about overall rates of returns on common stocks. There is, in addition, a growing body of empirical evidence investigating the performance of alternative portfolio maintenance strategies [4, 8, 9, and 13]. However, to date, this evidence for rates of return under alternative portfolio strategies has been obtained for a “one-time” investment decision (with allowances for reinvestment of dividends and possible intraportfolio reallocation). In this paper the effects of alternative portfolio accumulation strategies on subsequent portfolio rates of returns are examined.

In a previous paper we reviewed the literature on normative stock price models. These models specified the present value of a share of common stock to be equal to the discounted value of dividends accruing to the holder. Using continuous discounting, the present value of a share is (1)

where Dt is the dividend rate at time t and k is the cost of equity capital. Presumably k is a function of both the stockholders' time value of money and the perceived risk or uncertainty associated with the future dividend stream.

In many nonlinear programming applications the objective function has an inherent uncertainty that depends upon a set of random variables that have a known distribution. If one wishes to optimize the expectation of the objective, as suggested by the expected utility theorem, then as is shown here one can often solve such problems by modifying standard nonlinear programming algorithms. To illustrate what is involved, the details and justification for the application of the interior parametric sequential unconstrained maximization technique and the generalized programming method for the solution of such problems are given. Some related problems with stochastic constraints for which the solution method applies are mentioned and an example of a portfolio selection problem is given.

The theory of choice under conditions of certainty has been extended by Von Neumann and Morgenstern [8], Friedman and Savage [5], Marschak [13], and others to conditions involving risk by assuming that individuals maximize their expected utility. The application of this theory to portfolio selection, to efficiency criteria, and to the explanation of the well-known phenomenon of diversification of assets has been carried further by Markowitz [11 and 12], Tobin [17], Samuelson [15], Sharpe [16], and Lintner [10], and more recently by Hadar and Russell [5] and Hanoch and Levy [8].

A proposition is proved which shows that each member of an important class of investment and financing projects has a unique nonnegative internal rate of return. Nonuniqueness of the internal rate of return is thus shown to occur less frequently than formerly believed. The correspondence between the proposition and previous results on the uniqueness of the internal rate of return is briefly indicated.

In his famous 1964 article, Paul A. Samuelson [1] presents what he calls “the only sensible definition of depreciation,” namely, the period change in the present value of future cash flows expected to be generated by an asset.

Regression analysis is by far the most popular of all the statistical techniques employed in financial research. Almost without exception, the models employed have been additive in both the parameters and the variables (regressors).

“A Note on Geometric Mean Portfolio Selection and the Market Prices of Equities” Robert H. Litzenberger and A. P. Budd Volume VI, No. 5, December 1971