This paper tests the ability of the American option pricing model proposed by Parkinson [18] or Mason [14] to explain the pricing of the foreign currency options traded on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange from February 28, 1983 to March 26, 1985. We find that the model underprices out-of-the-money options relative to at-the-money and in-the-money options. This relative underpricing is driven by an underpricing of out-of-the-money call options of short maturity. In addition, the degree of relative mispricing for most categories of options is shown to be a decreasing function of the time to maturity of the options. Longer maturity options appear to trade at similar levels of implied volatility whether they are in, at, or out of the money. Most of these biases appear consistent with the fact that the underlying spot currency rate follows a mixed jump diffusion process as described in [17].

This paper studies the impact of market consolidation or fragmentation on its performance, examining four alternative models of exchange: a consolidated clearing house, fragmented clearing houses, a monopoly dealer market, and an interdealer market. The effects of the market mechanism on the expected quantity traded, the price variance faced by individual traders, the quality of market price signals, the expected gains from trade, and the exchange implementation costs are studied.

Evidence provided here suggests that investors could have identified, ex ante, portfolios that hedge against uncertainty in the prices of three major categories of consumption: food, shelter, and transportation. This finding has implications for the practical importance of multi-period capital asset pricing theories that assume investors can identify such hedge portfolios. The study also provides some surprising evidence about the usefulness of common stocks and commodity futures contracts in hedging against specific price inflation. Certain combinations of common stocks serve as effective hedges, but combinations of commodity futures contracts contribute nothing to hedging ability.

This paper develops a positive theory of trade credit based on its use as a financial response to deterministic variations in demand. The operating alternatives to trade credit, which include the use of storage or additional capacity, are modeled using results from the peak-load pricing literature. The paper shows that the extension of credit partitions the buyer's inventory cost and permits specialization at incurring the components of this cost. This specialization is economical when the seller has an advantage at incurring the financial cost and does not have an advantage at incurring the operating cost of accommodating variable demand. Conditions that provide these necessary and sufficient cost relationships are described. The paper also shows that a reduction in costs rather than an increase in revenues is the source of both the buyer's and seller's increase in wealth.

Our paper extends prior work on abandonment and replacement policies by analyzing the effects of both the Darby and the Fisher interest rate hypotheses. In most of the new cases developed, the effect of increased inflation on economic life is ambiguous. In the abandonment problem, we find a greater tendency under the Fisher hypothesis than under the Darby hypothesis for increased inflation to result in an extension of economic life. In contrast, for the replacement problem, there is a greater tendency under the Fisher hypothesis (than under Darby) for inflation to shorten the asset holding period.

This paper presents new tests of the mixture of distributions hypothesis. Previous tests examined security prices and volume measured only at daily intervals. Here, differential implications of the hypothesis for transaction data are derived and tested. The new predictions emanate from the assumption that prices and volume evolve at uniform rates in transaction time. The results support this assumption and the mixture of distributions hypothesis in general. In addition, the tests suggest that the daily transaction-count may be a useful instrumental variable for estimating unobserved realizations of stochastic price variances.

This paper reexamines and extends the work of Ben Horim and Levy [1], which argued that risk decomposition should be based on standard deviation rather than on variance. Their analysis showed that decomposition of variance is wrong when β < 0 and that, in general, this procedure produces incorrect estimates of undiversifiable risk. This paper shows that these conclusions also apply to the no-risk-free asset extended CAPM if risk is adjusted for the unavoidable risk associated with the global minimum variance portfolio.

In this article, Dr. Newbury focuses on the technical and financial reasons for amalgamation at the Kimberley mines in South Africa, drawing on primary records to account for the rise of De Beers as the world's major diamond mining company in the 1880s. He finds that prior experience in local government and on the mining boards prepared company directors for competition in joint stock enterprise, while differences in production policies and performance influenced the pattern of mergers within and among the four Kimberley mines. De Beers's close relationship with diamond merchants and private banks in London, particularly N. M. Rothschild & Sons, was central to its position as a prime mover toward consolidation. Dr. Newbury views De Beers as a firm that relied for its success less on its renowned chairman, Cecil J. Rhodes, than on a combined managerial expertise that reflected the interests of both mining producers and merchant buyers.