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Working Paper
A discrete choice model of dividend reinvestment plans: classification and prediction
We study 852 companies with dividend reinvestment plans in 1999 matched by total assets to 852 companies without such plans. We use discrete choice methods to predict the classification of these companies. We interpret the misclassified companies as being likely to switch their plan status. That is, if a firm's financial data suggest that a company should have had a dividend reinvestment plan in 1999 but did not, then we expect that it would be more likely to institute a plan than the other companies in the sample. Conversely, if it did have a plan but the financial data suggest that it ...
Journal Article
Direct investments in securities: A primer
Direct investment plans (commonly known as DRIPs) let investors bypass traditional investment channels and avoid problems such as high transactions costs and the relatively large dollar amounts necessary to purchase certain assets. While no one expects these plans to answer all of the modern investor's needs, DRIPs probably appeal to the buy-and-hold clientele seeking the lowest possible transactions costs. ; This article discusses DRIPs, describing how the financial services industry has evolved to meet the needs of the small investor. The author identifies the remaining limitations on this ...
Working Paper
Anticipating bailouts: the incentive-conflict model and the collapse of the Ohio Deposit Guarantee Fund
An examination of the effect of the collapse of the Ohio Deposit Guarantee Fund on insured financial institutions in the context of the incentive-conflict model developed by Edward Kane, finding that differences in abnormal returns of FDIC and FSLIC firms tend to reaffirm that taxpayer-funded bailouts are a natural outgrowth of the moral-hazard problem that taxpayers face.
Working Paper
Understanding 401(k) plans
Questions about the future of the Social Security system continue to surface. As a result, interest in employer-sponsored retirement plans and other retirement investment options increases. But the restrictions and rules associated with various defined benefit plans such as 401(k), 403 (b), and 457 plans can be confusing, and these plans have risks of their own. The authors explore these plans and explain the need to view retirement savings as only one part of a portfolio.
Working Paper
Analyzing imputed financial data: a new approach to cluster analysis
The authors introduce a novel statistical modeling technique to cluster analysis and apply it to financial data. Their two main goals are to handle missing data and to find homogeneous groups within the data. Their approach is flexible and handles large and complex data structures with missing observations and with quantitative and qualitative measurements. The authors achieve this result by mapping the data to a new structure that is free of distributional assumptions in choosing homogeneous groups of observations. Their new method also provides insight into the number of different ...
Working Paper
On flexibility, capital structure, and investment decisions for the insured bank
Most models of deposit insurance assume that the volatility of a bank's assets is exogenously provided. Although this framework allows the impact of volatility on bankruptcy costs and deposit insurance subsidies to be explored, it is static and does not incorporate the fact that equityholders can respond to market events by adjusting previous investment and leverage decisions. This paper presents a dynamic model of a bank that allows for such behavior. The flexibility of being able to respond dynamically to market information has value to equityholders. The impact and value of this ...
Journal Article
Standardizing world securities clearance systems
A discussion of how the dramatic increase in the volume of international securities trading has strained the present system of settling trades. Included are nine recommendations made by the Group of Thirty to reduce the risk and cost of trading in financial markets worldwide and the difficulties that would accompany implementation of a new system.
Working Paper
Variability and stationarity of term premia
Journal Article
Settlement delays and stock prices
An analysis of whether investors consider the length of the settlement delay between the time a stock trade is executed and the security is delivered. By modeling stock returns and conducting regression tests, the author concludes that stock prices do reflect the effects of the settlement delay.