Contrasting with the resentment of other power structures, especially corporate business, that democratic governments display is the obvious need of the powerful and the productive for each other in times of stress. Professor McQuaid follows the activities of a group of “corporate liberals” (i.e., big business leaders who believed that intelligent collaboration between business, government, and organized labor was an attainable goal) from World War I through the prosperous 1920s, the despondent 1930s, and the busy and prosperous years of World War II. He concludes that corporate liberal opinion grew more influential in both corporate and governmental circles during and after the period.

Rapid changes in the relationship between business and government from 1890 onwards brought a growing desire for a better exchange of ideas and information and, particularly, for a national organization that would facilitate this exchange. While the United States Chamber of Commerce has been viewed almost universally as the outcome of efforts by businessmen, Professor Werking shows that it was a few government bureaucrats, notably in the relatively new and ambitious Department of Commerce and Labor, who, with the support of the Secretary and the White House, became the decisive factor in the birth of the Chamber in 1912.

In an earlier note in this Journal Strangways and Yandle (S-Y) [2] reported the results of a series of statistical tests on the effects of state usury laws on housing starts in 1966. Using cross sectional analysis, they focused on both the absolute level of single family housing starts in 1966 and the change in housing starts from 1965 to 1966.

In recent years, a number of studies have been published evaluating alternative bond portfolio strategies. These studies basically simulate risk-return characteristics for a variety of strategies designed for use by financial institutions. Typical strategies considered include portfolios of bonds that have laddered or barbell (dumbbell) maturity structures. In laddered strategies, bonds are spaced evenly among a number of consecutive maturities, while in barbell strategies, bonds are concentrated in short and long maturities. The results of these studies tend to differ and conflict. For example, in a recent article in this journal, Fogler, Groves, and Richardson (FGR) conclude that “dumbbell portfolio strategies are not as efficient as indicated by previous analyses.” Among the previous studies to which they refer is one by Watson, who concluded that “portfolios split between a spaced group of short maturity bonds and a longer investment security” (barbell portfolios) are most efficient. Similar results are reported by Wolf and by Bradley and Crane.

Since the seminal article by Black and Scholes on the pricing of corporate liabilities, the importance in finance of contingent claims has become widely recognized. The key to the valuation of such claims has been found to lie in the solution to certain partial differential equations. The best known of these was derived by Black and Scholes, in their original article, from the assumption that the value of the asset underlying the contingent claim follows a geometric Brownian motion.

In a recent issue of JFQA, Aucamp and Eckardt [1] (henceforth referred to as AE), developed a new sufficient condition for the existence of a unique (and simple) nonnegative internal rate of return (IRR), which includes the one previously formulated by Norstrøm [8] as a particular case. As pointed out by the former authors, their new procedure is appealing since it is easier to apply than the rather involved Sturm-Kaplan [6] method, while being a refinement of Norstrøm's result.