In this article Professor Shmanske examines the history of the wire service industry with special attention to two economic peculiarities: the “public good” nature of news dissemination and the different ownership structures of the competing firms. By focusing on the interplay of the nonprofit, cooperative organizational structure of the Associated Press and the public good characteristics of news, the author provides a new and economically sound explanation for the AP's relative success. In addition, he demonstrates that many unusual institutions in the news-providing industry, particularly pricing structures, can be understood by analyzing the economic and marketing problems associated with private-sector production of a public good.

Extremely successful both as an investment and as a commercial banker, Charles E. Mitchell was identified by contemporaries as the epitome of the unscrupulous “money changers” whose speculative dealings they felt played a major role in the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic collapse. This portrayal has been echoed and elaborated by historians and commentators down to the present day. In this article Dr. Huertas and Dr. Silverman demonstrate that Mitchell's activities, while sometimes ill-advised, were motivated by the economic“good sense” of the day and were not attributable to either rampant immorality or ungoverned greed. At the same time, they direct the attention of economic historians to the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve system in the 1920s and 1930s—in which Mitchell also played a role—and suggest that a more potent source of the Great Depression lies therein.

In this article Professor Hyde examines in detail the use of industrial spies at a large Michigan copper mine in the early twentieth century. While many historians have argued that labor spies were powerful weapons effectively used by employers in their struggles with workers, Hyde finds in his case study of the Quincy Mining Company that spies were seldom useful in providing important labor intelligence. Instead, they inadvertently provided top management with valuable information about underground working conditions and the performance of foremen and petty bosses.

This paper demonstrates that refunding discounted debt represents a form of tax arbitrage that is profitable to taxpaying corporations when the present value of the additional tax shields, created through the refunding, exceeds the sum of the present value of the overall increase in pre-tax debt service requirements, after-tax transaction costs, and any tax incurred on the gain. The paper contrasts the factors that give rise to profitable opportunities to refund high-coupon debt and discounted debt. It also shows that, of the analytical approaches previously suggested for calculating the net advantage of refunding discounted debt, discounting the change in after-tax debt service payments at the after-tax cost of money for the refunding issue is the only one consistent with preserving debt service parity.

We show that the U.S. agricultural price support system, and certain other government insurance programs, can be interpreted as the provision of a random number of put options to program beneficiaries. Because the number of puts being supplied is random, the value of the guarantees is no longer given by the standard Black-Scholes put option formula. This paper uses the contingent-claims methodology of modern finance theory to derive an appropriate valuation formula for such programs. We estimate the value to farmers of agricultural price supports for several commodities covered by the U.S. agricultural price support system. Our results indicate that the current system raises the ex ante value of some crops by as much as 9 percent. The method of valuation is applicable to other forms of government guarantees, as well, such as exchange rate insurance and export subsidy guarantees.

While the value of listing equity securities has been researched extensively, no studies have examined the market reaction to the decision to list corporate debt. Since the listing of corporate bonds on the major exchanges is a significant corporate activity, this study examines the impact of bond listing on shareholder wealth. Using a variety of possible announcement dates as well as cumulative abnormal returns between dates, no detectable market reaction to debt listing is found. Therefore, the listing of corporate bonds does not appear to be valued by the common shareholders of those same firms.

This paper discusses two fundamental issues in capital structure theory and analyzes the recent recapitalizations of Phillips and Unocal. It is shown that a value-maximizing capital structure may be inconsistent with shareholder utility maximization and that the Miller debt and taxes equilibrium may be inconsistent with a complete capital market. In spite of these and other unresolved issues, the markets's reactions to the recent recapitalizations of Phillips and Unocal are consistent with the predictions of capital structure theory. Except for small redistribution effects against bondholders, the recapitalizations per se had no positive impact on common stock values.

Event studies generally seek to measure abnormal security performance associated with firm-specific events. In principle, estimators of and tests for abnormal performance should appropriately reflect cross-sectional dependence between abnormal returns to different securities. Joint generalized least squares provides a natural framework for developing such estimators and tests. This paper derives a joint generalized least squares estimator and related test statistic applicable in the typical event study context. Simulation techniques comparable to those of Brown and Warner [2] are used to assess the frequency distribution of the estimator and power of the test statistic. Several simpler procedures are simulated for comparison. The results provide no evidence that joint generalized least squares is superior to simpler procedures.

New cross-sectional tests of the Mixture of Distributions Hypothesis are presented. The tests assume that the distribution of the mixing variable (often interpreted as the daily rate of flow of information) is not identical for all securities. Cross-security differences in the mixing distribution cause cross-security differences in the joint distribution of returns and volume. The Hypothesis provides predictions about how these differences appear in the joint distribution. The predictions are confirmed in tests based on cross-security correlations among summary statistics that characterize shape and covariational attributes of the joint distribution of returns and volume. The results are consistent with the Mixture of Distributions Hypothesis.

This paper is an event-time study of OTC stocks that listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) over the period 1966–1977. This period was chosen because it spans the introduction of the National Association of Securities Dealers Automatic Quotation (NASDAQ) communications system in the OTC market. In the pre-NASDAQ period, stocks, on average, earn significant positive abnormal returns in response to listing announcements. In the post-NASDAQ period, abnormal returns in response to listing announcements are statistically significantly lower than those for the pre-NASDAQ period. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that NASDAQ has reduced the benefits associated with listing on a major stock exchange. Additionally, in both the pre- and post- NASDAQ periods, stocks, on average, earn significant positive abnormal returns following the initial announcement of listing before listing actually occurs, and they earn significant negative returns immediately after listing. These anomalies are explored and the results are shown to be insensitive to variations in empirical methodology.

The adoption of the incentive-signalling framework gives a reasonably good explanation of the corporate dividend decision. The equilibrium optimal dividend decision under such a framework is presented and analyzed, assuming a reward-penalty managerial incentive scheme is used. It is shown that the size of the declared dividend is an increasing function of expected cash flow. However, there exists a trend that points out that the higher the level of expected cash flow, the lower the marginal effects of cash flow on dividends. A similar relationship is observed with respect to changes in expected cash flows. These conclusions are in harmony with “real world” behavior as reported by several empirical studies. The effects of uncertainty and interest rates on dividends are also analyzed. It is shown, in agreement with observed phenomena, that the higher the uncertainty, the lower the dividend/payout ratio.

This article examines the interest rate risk characteristics of a general class of floating rate securities, which includes Chance's securities as a special case. The calculation of duration for Chance's securities is zero, as it should be. Securities in the broader class can have durations that are negative or longer than the period of time that must elapse before the payments can reflect changes in market interest rates. The effect on duration of changes in the parameters of the function relating interest rate shocks to the payments and changes in the slope of the term structure are examined.