As an alteration of the firm's productive asset portfolio, divestiture is the mirror-image of asset acquisition or merger. Yet, though significant efforts have been expended by researchers into the implications of acquisition and merger, the literature of finance is all but silent on the subject of divestiture.

Reports of firms with working capital problems have been widespread in recent years, particularly since the Penn Central debacle, whose failure caused a genuine confidence crisis which spread rapidly throughout all segments of the financial markets. A survey of the literature produced little evidence which had sought to determine the impact of a company's liquidity position on the market price of its common stock. This study first laid a theoretical framework for explaining possible effects of various levels of liquidity on equity values. Then, four hypotheses were investigated:

1. A corporation's liquidity position has an identifiable impact upon investors' evaluation of a common stock.

It is not uncommon on occasions such as this to talk about the shortcomings in the theory of Finance, and to emphasize how little progress has been made in answering the basic questions in Finance, despite enormous research efforts. Indeed, it is not uncommon on such occasions to attack our basic “mythodology,” particularly the “Ivory Tower” nature of our assumptions, as the major reasons for our lack of progress. Like a Sunday morning sermon, such talks serve many useful functions. For one, they serve to deflate our professional egos. For another, they serve to remind us that the importance of a contribution as judged by our professional peers (the gold we really work for) is often not closely aligned with its operational importance in the outside world. Also, such talks serve to comfort those just entering the field, by letting them know that there is much left to do because so little has been done. While such talks are not uncommon, this is not what my talk is about. Rather, my discussion centers on the positive progress made in the development of a theory of Finance using the continuous-time mode of analysis.

This paper derives a generalized Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to allow the investment horizon to be explicitly introduced into the risk-return relationship of capital asset pricing. It is shown that the systematic risk estimated from this generalized CAPM includes finite systematic risk, Jensen systematic risk, and Cheng–Deets (CD) systematic risk as a special case. From the relationship among the finite horizon type CAPM, the Jensen instantaneous type CAPM, and the generalized CAPM, it is found that the investment horizon problem can be treated as a functional form problem which is similar to determining whether a Cobb-Douglas type or a CES type production function is appropriate in estimating a production relationship. As the rates of return on security and market rates of return are log normally distributed, it is shown that Jensen instantaneous systematic risk is identical to CD instantaneous systematic risk. Under this circumstance, it also is shown that the finite systematic risk is approximately equal to the instantaneous systematic risk times an adjustment factor.

Over the past fifteen years we have seen an enormous increase in the theoretical and empirical literature in the field of finance. This outpouring of academic research has had a substantial impact on the content of finance courses including the introductory course. However, the changes in content at the introductory level appear to me to have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Textbooks contain more analytical and theoretical material, but this material is provided within traditional structures. The contents of the chapters have changed but not the titles of chapters nor the sequencing. With minor changes in wording I would guess that course outlines of today appear little different from those of ten years ago. I am not particularly disturbed by these observations, but I believe it is time to take a close look at what we are doing to our students, and I would like to explore the possibilities of a more coherent approach to the introductory course.

Choice under uncertainty may be viewed as choice between alternative probability distributions of returns. Under Von Neumann and Morgenstern's assumptions, an individual's optimal choice is a distribution that maximizes the expected utility of returns. In the theoretical analysis, the distribution functions are assumed to be known However, in most realistic cases, the distributions of returns are unknown and are estimated using available economic data. The traditional mode of analysis is to neglect the estimation risk and use the estimated distribution (in lieu of the true distribution) in determining the optimal choice under uncertainty. In this paper, we consider the portfolio choice problem and determine the effect of estimation risk on an individual's optimal choice under uncertainty.

The content of the basic course in finance is analyzed in terms of a number of dimensions. My presentation will focus on six areas: (1) our clients and their needs, (2) the managerial orientation, (3) coverage, (4) role of specialized techniques, (5) application to other purposive organizations, and (6) social responsibility issues.

A major benefit of efficient markets is that observed market prices can be assumed to provide an accurate reflection of underlying intrinsic values. For a market to be efficient, however, sufficient numbers of market participants must engage in trading activity to ensure that observed prices are representative of the true but unobserved equilibrium price. Even though the pricing mechanism may impound the effect of all available information, the market price may be biased from the equilibrium price if the market is thin. This paper uses the price behavior of standardized call options traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange to examine the relation between volume and inside efficiency.