Schwartz [3] proposed a model to solve for the value of a warrant or an option when a closed-form solution of the valuation equation cannot be obtained. This model is based on a difference approximation of the valuation equation and uses standard numerical methods. We intend to show here that the same methods can be used to derive a difference approximation of the solution of the valuation equation which has a greater level of accuracy than Schwartz's approximation.

A number of studies have compared the investment risk of various industries and of various individual corporations in developed countries (DCs). The purpose of this paper is to compare investment risk in DCs with less developed countries (LDCs). The variance of returns to investment in common stocks provides a natural measure of investment risk and will be used in this study. Studies in LDCs include work of Levy and Sarnat [12], [13]. Errunza [3], [4], and Lessard [11]. Levy and Sarnat and Errunza found low economy-wide investment risk on an average for LDCs (relative to DCs), with stock indices being used as surrogates for economy-wide risk. These results are not unambiguous, however, because there are probable difficulties due to infrequent trading and averaging in the broad market indices used in the above studies. Hence, we use a sample of the largest corporations that suffer little, if at all, from thin trading and/or averaging.

The relationship between heterogeneous expectations on the part of investors with respect to a security's future return and asset prices is an area of increasing interest in finance. Theoretical examples include Miller [14], Williams [23], and Jarrow [8]. Empirical examples include Bart and Masse [1] and Peterson and Peterson [18]. Miller, Bart and Masse, and Peterson and Peterson address issues related to whether an increase in divergence of opinion will lead to an increase in an asset's price. Unfortunately, little is known of how different types of changes in investors' probability distributions of returns influence asset returns. An even more basic problem is that it is not clear what is meant in terms of investor probability distributions when it is said that divergence of opinion increases or decreases. The answer to this problem has important implications for understanding equilibrium price.

Hedgers adjust their futures market positions to reflect new information. Therefore, the anticipation of new information creates future decision points and thus a multiperiod decision problem. Previous studies (see [2], [4], [5], [7], and [8]) which solved the problem of choosing optimal futures market hedges have not addressed this issue. Rather, these studies have derived optimal hedges in one-period frameworks. In general, this solution is incorrect if, during the time the hedge is in effect, new information is anticipated.

Received monetary theory supports the existence of a strong relationship between monetary activity and stock prices. Following the work of Friedman and Schwartz [8], relating money supply to aggregate economic activity, some researchers have examined the more specific connection between changes in the rate of growth of money supply and associated movements in stock prices (see [6], [10], [11], [14], [17], [18], [19], [20], [22], and [28]). These studies use a variety of monetary aggregate measures to functionally relate the level of stock market indices to contemporaneous and lagged monetary growth rates. In general, the findings indicate a direct relationship between money supply and stock returns.

Considerable attention has been focused recently on models of firms under uncertainty in which there is an incomplete set of securities markets. In these models, each firm can issue only one security and consumers can generate consumption plans only through the purchase of firms' securities. Consequently, if the economy is competitive, each stockholder of a firm will impute the same value to the firm in equilibrium, where this value is given by the market price of the firm's security. However, stockholders will not, in general, have the same implicit prices for state-contingent consumption. Since the financial market is said to be incomplete if the number of independent securities is less than the number of states of nature, consumers cannot hedge perfectly, whichimplies that unconstrained Pareto-optimal allocations are not generally attainable (see [2] and [3]). Finally, it is unclear what firms' objectives should be in these models because profit maximization is not well defined; firms' profits in different states cannot be aggregated into a single index. It is still generally accepted, however, that firms should operate in their own stockholders'interests, a necessary condition for allocative efficiency.

The major objective of Ken Eades' paper is to provide new insights into the role of dividend changes as information signaling devices. Eades argues that the traditional notion of the “information content of dividends” is based more on conjecture than on a well-specified economic model. Eades suggests that without a well-specified model, we are limited significantly in producing testable hypotheses about dividend signaling. Therefore, Eades extends the dividend signaling model of Bhattacharya [2] and provides statistical tests of the resulting hypotheses.

Protection of pensions is a most important subject. The date that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) was signed, September 2, 1974, is considered the second most important date in social legislation in the United States--second only to the enactment of Social Security.

This paper serves as an intuitive companion piece to a more technical paper in which Forsythe and Suchanek (F–S) introduce a model which demonstrates “the impossibility of efficient decision rules for firms in competitive stock market economies.” F–S are to be commended for undertaking this effort. The major theme of this paper appears to be that “inefficient equilibria are generic to competitive stock market economies.” This is contrary to the general belief that not only do complete financial markets but also a wide variety of incomplete financial markets guarantee efficient financial equilibria. The F–S model claims to demonstrate otherwise.

Corporate pension plans represent a large and growing force in the capital market. Their promised benefits comprise a large portion of the expected retirement income of millions of employees. Because of this importance, and because of some widely publicized abuses and scandals, these plans were the subject of increased governmental regulation in the 1970s. One outgrowth of this has been the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) under which the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) provides insurance of pension benefits. The objective of this paper is to develop a multiperiod model of the pension plan in order (1) to evaluate the robustness of prior analyses of the wealth transfers caused by the passage of ERISA among workers, firms, and the PBGC; (2) to characterize the nature of a PBGC insurance scheme which could, if it were so desired, reduce the potential liability of the PBGC; and (3) to serve as a prototype for modeling the multiperiod pension plan.

The investment performance of professionally managed portfolios, in general, and mutual funds, in particular, has been the subject of considerable attention in finance. Fama [9] has suggested that overall portfolio performance be broken down in such a manner that the individual sources of performance can be identified. Two basic sources are: (1) the ability of the portfolio manager to forecast price movements of individual common stocks relative to stocks in general (selectivity or microforecasting); and (2) the ability to forecast the direction of the stock market relative to fixed income securities (timing or macroforecasting).

The role of dividends in firm valuation continues to be a theoretical puzzle as well as an empirical obsession with economists. The pioneering work by Modigliani and Miller (MM) ([32], [29]) is the archetype of the theoretical dilemma. Whereas the authors proved convincingly the irrelevance of dividend policy to firm value within a perfect capital market, they tempered their irrelevance proposition with what is usually referred to as the “information content of dividends” (ICD) hypothesis. In a more scientific sense, this hypothesis should be labeled as a conjecture, since it is essentially an ad hoc observation that dividends may convey information to the capital market concerning a firm's future earnings potential. Even though the ICD hypothesis was not derived from a well-specified economic model, it has, nevertheless, been subjected to a plethora of empirical studies. In general, these studies have focused upon the precise influence of dividend changes upon a firm's common stock price. Overall, the results can be described as being supportive of the notion that stock price movements are positively correlated with cash dividend changes. This correlation, of course, is consistent with the ICD hypothesis.

The behavior of economic agents in the presence of uncertainty about exogenous events and imperfect information about the endogenously influenced actions of other agents with whom they contract has been receiving growing attention. In particular, the economic theory of agency explicitly recognizes that when agents enter into synergistic relationships, each agent will act in a manner consistent with the maximization of its personal welfare, thus giving rise to a phenomenon called moral hazard. Harris and Raviv [8], Holmström [10], and Shavell [21] have analyzed the nature of Pareto-optimal contractual mechanisms designed to ameliorate moral hazard and achieve efficient risk sharing. Jensen and Meckling [12], Grossman and Hart [6], and Thakor and Gorman [22] have explored the impact of moral hazard on the capital structure decisions of firms. Arrow [1] explained the absence of complete contingent claims markets on the basis of moral hazard, and Harris and Raviv [7] have examined the impact of moral hazard on the structure of health insurance contracts.

The Black-Scholes [4] call option model is a member of the class of constant elasticity of variance call option models proposed by Cox [6]. While the Black-Scholes model assumes that the volatility or instantaneous variance of return is constant through time, the other members of the class allow the volatility to change with the stock price. This property is of interest because empirical evidence suggests that returns to common stock are heteroscedastic and also that volatilities, implied from the Black-Scholes model and market prices of call options, are not constant.