The current scholarly interest in contemporary Japanese businesses has somewhat obscured their equally fascinating early historical development. In this article, Professor Wilkins emphasizes both the extent and the variety of Japanese multinational enterprise before the First World War, and offers a basis for comparing its differences and similarities with the conventional American model.

Welfare capitalism has been perceived by many historians as succumbing to the stresses of the Depression. The work of recent scholars has contributed to an understanding of welfarism's continued existence through the 1930s and beyond, but little attention has been given to the process by which employers revitalized welfare work after the 1920s. In this article, Ms. Fones-Wolf explores the key role the Second World War played in helping to expand and legitimize corporate-sponsored welfarism, particularly in the area of recreational activity. With union resistance to welfare plans diminished, employers were able to extend their experimentation with this managerial device, thereby helping to defuse a postwar resurgence of militant unionism.

To date, a number of studies involving the use of bond prices and/or returns have utilized the published prices of trades on the New York and other exchanges. These exchange quotes reflect the odd-lot activities of individual investors and account for only a negligible portion of the trading in listed issues. In contrast, the vast majority of listed corporate trading occurs over-the-counter and involves round-lot trades between institutions. Given differences in market characteristics, odd-lot exchange prices may differ substantially from those in the round-lot institutional market. This study compares exchange quotations from Moody's Bond Record with prices assigned by Merrill Lynch's institutional pricing service and uses each set of prices to calculate return and risk measures. Institutional (Merrill Lynch) bond prices are shown to be systematically greater than exchange (Moody's) prices. In addition, bond returns based on Merrill Lynch prices are shown to yield significantly higher beta and R2 estimates, as well as significantly lower standard deviation and residual risk estimates.

Previous anomaly research may have misinterpreted corrected, for the market index, mean returns on small firms. Assuming mean-variance preferences, it is shown theoretically that corrected mean returns (i.e., market line deviations) are not indicative of the relative desirability of increasing the proportional investment in small firms. The correct improvement criterion is derived and estimated. Tests indicate that the value-weighted market index is not significantly improved with greater weight on small firms, in the average month. When seasonality is considered, the observed performance improvements due to small or large firms are significant in some months, but the required portfolio position is unclear. If a case exists for a small firm anomaly in January, it probably exists in other months and it also exists for large firms. It is doubtful whether such an anomalous stock market exists.

This paper investigates the effect on shareholder wealth of two events that change management's choice between negotiated and competitive underwritten equity offerings. These two events are the suspension and termination of suspension of Rule 50. (This rule is based on the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 and requires certain utilities to use the competitive method.) The results indicate that the shareholders of the affected utilities experience an abnormal negative return on the announcement of the suspension of Rule 50, and an abnormal positive return on the announcement of the termination of suspension. This evidence is consistent with the joint hypothesis: (i) competitive offerings are less costly than negotiated offerings, and (ii) manager-shareholder agency costs are a determinant of the corporate choice between these two methods of raising equity.

This paper investigates the efficiency of the market for foreign currency options with the help of a modified version of the Black-Scholes model. The evidence in the ex post tests is inconsistent with this hypothesis since we find a large number of opportunities for abnormal profits. A second set of tests is conducted on an ex ante basis to determine whether these profit opportunities exist even if the execution of the strategy is delayed by one day. The evidence from these tests provides more support for the hypothesis of market efficiency.