From its beginnings as a supplier of lamps for bicycles in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Professor Church follows Joseph Lucas Ltd., through three generations of management and several revolutions in the character of its trade, to its emergence as the largest supplier of components to British automobile manufacturers. Shrewd but rigidly upstanding business policies, a clear-headed view to the future, and conservative financing methods gave Lucas's the strength and flexibility to survive and eventually dominate a field that was constantly changing, and in which both domestic and foreign competition was an important factor. Lucas's management, watching the rise and fall of firms that were, as Professor Church says, “young, inventive, and financially weak,” might have agreed with Andrew Carnegie that “pioneering don't pay.” But Lucas's, like Carnegie, pioneered with great success where increased productivity, lower prices, and growth were the rewards.

One of the most durable stereotypes of recent American history is that of the 1920s as “a conservative Republican interlude between the progressive Democratic administrations of Wilson and Roosevelt.” An important feature of this stereotype is the “Mellon plan” for tax reform. Professor Murray demonstrates that there was remarkable unanimity among Republicans and Democrats on the policy issues addressed by the “Mellon plan,” and finds continuity, rather than contrast, between the tax plans of the Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge administrations. As Secretaries of the Treasury came and went between 1918 and 1921, staff assistants cultivated the plan which Mellon later adopted.

Is there a “military-industrial complex” in the United States? What is the relationship between business, government, and the military with its needs for vast quantities of goods and services? How has organization for war and defense changed since the demands of World War I first made such questions important? How much do we know about what actually happened between World War I and Vietnam to change the relationship between private and public organizations? Professor Cuff discusses the complexities involved in trying to answer such historical questions, and prescribes a professional historian's regimen for future work on this subject.

Stochastic Dominance rules are playing an increasingly prominent role in the literature on choice under uncertainty. Their foundation is the mainstream VonNeumann-Morgenstern expected utility paradigm. Their essence is to provide an admissible set of choices under restrictions on the utility functions that follow from prevalent and appealing modes of economic behavior: The admissible sets generated are useful for a large group of individual decision makers and the optimal choice for an individual can then be obtained from among the smaller set of admissible choices.

In the applications of mathematical programming to the “pure capital rationing” problem, much of the attention has been focused on the search for an appropriate discount rate to account for the time value of money. The essential difficulty was first observed by Hirshleifer [10] in the classical economics context: “The discount rate to be used for calculating present values…cannot be discovered until the solution is attained, and so is of no assistance in reaching the solution.” Baumol and Quandt [1] showed that this problem persists in the Lorie and Savage [11] and Weingartner [15, Chap. 3] mathematical programming formulation and concluded that: “If there is capital rationing and external rates of interest are irrelevant, we cannot simultaneously insist on a present value formulation of the objective function and have the relevant discount rates determined internally by our program.” They then went on to propose an alternative utility formulation of the objective function.

As the multinational corporation (MNC) becomes the norm rather than the exception, the need to internationalize the tools of domestic financial analysis is apparent. A key question is: What cost-of-capital figure should be used in appraising the profitability of foreign investments? This paper seeks to provide a comprehensive approach to analyze the cost-of-capital question. It begins by extending the weighted cost-of-capital concept to the multinational firm. It then builds on previous research to address the following related topics: national or multinational financial structure norms; the role of parent company guarantees; the costing of various fund sources particularly when exchange risk is present; the impact of tax and regulatory factors; risk and diversification; and joint ventures.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the internal rate of return (IRR) even when unique and real may nevertheless be an incorrect measure of the return on investment, and to prove that all projects characterized by negative flows occurring only at the beginning and end will be mixed investments for which the IRR, whether unique and real or not, is not a correct measure of investment return.