In a previous issue of this journal Boot and Frankfurter (hereafter B-F) published the results of their study on the optimal mix of short-and-long-term debt. While interesting, their results appear to be open to question on the following grounds:

1. Use of wrong data: The short-term borrowing data used by B-F in their regression analysis include the following items which do not generally and, rightly so, belong to short-term debt:

(a) Reserve for deferred or future income taxes,

(b) Restricted surplus for deferred taxes,

(c) Insurance reserves,

(d) Surplus reserves,

(e) Unamortised debt premium, and

(f) Contributions for constructions.

In the past most of the studies whose aim was to explain earnings-to-price ratios (or alternatively, price-earnings ratios) of common stocks attempted to answer the much-debated question raised in both investment and academic circles: Why does a given common stock consistently command a higher price relative to its earnings vis-a-vis other stocks? Success in answering this question has been limited, largely due to (1) researchers' inability to incorporate expected earnings (E) correctly into the empirical measurement of earnings-to-price ratio and/or (2) inadequate treatment of risk variables to explain variability of earnings-to-price ratio.

Single-period portfolio selection deals with the allocation of an investor's initial wealth to a finite number of risky assets according to his preferences over random final wealth. The purpose of this paper is to study chance-constrained portfolio selection from the point of view of utility theory.

The purpose of this article is to produce a conservative estimate of how often traditionally conceived seasonal components are present in prices of individual Dow Jones industrial stocks. A careful estimate is needed to resolve some of the current confusion on the question and to provide basic information along lines suggested by Smidt [27, p. 238]: “… investigations of the random walk hypothesis would be most fruitful if they were conducted in the spirit of attempting to determine the size and extent of systematic tendencies that may exist in price series” (italics added).

This study of the history of a large group of merchants directing Anglo-American commerce from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century analyzes major long-run changes in the organization and functions of mercantile institutions in that important period.

A survey of insurance records covering eighteenth-century manufactories in three branches of the British textile industry reveals much about the gradual evolution of factory production in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Professor Chapman suggests that neither size, power source, nor the supervision of work constitutes a useful criterion by which to identify the modern, Arkwright-type factory. The essential characteristic of that institution was that it was specifically designed for flow production, rather than the batch production methods of earlier modes of manufacturing.

Stable distributions are suggested as being the underlying distributions for many economic variables. Capital market variables, in particular, are said to follow a member of the symmetric stable class.