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Journal Article
Stock market efficiency: an autopsy?
This article assesses the current state of the efficient market hypothesis, which was the conventional wisdom among academic economists in the 1970s and most of the 1980s. It concludes that empirical evidence provides an overwhelming case against the efficient market hypothesis. The evidence exists in the form of a number of well-established anomalies--the small firm effect, the closed-end fund puzzle, the Value Line enigma, the losers blessing and winners curse, and the January and weekend effects. ; These anomalies can be explained by resorting to a model of "noise trading," in which ...
Journal Article
The municipal bond market, Part I: politics, taxes, and yields
This article assesses recent changes in the structure of the municipal bond market. It reviews the tax legislation, judicial interpretations, and other factors that affect the yield on municipal bonds. These factors are then employed in a statistical analysis of the determinants of municipal bond yields. ; The results of the analysis show that the ratio of yield to maturity on municipal bonds to yields on U.S. Treasury bonds (the interest rate ratio) has varied greatly in the past two decades and is greater for longer maturities. They also show that debate during 1986 about tax reform ...
Journal Article
Do municipal bond yields forecast tax policy?
During the recent flat tax debate, interest rates on long-term municipal bonds rose relative to the rate on U.S. Treasury bonds. This was widely attributed to expectations of a reduction in future tax rates. While an axiom of finance states that current asset prices reflect expectations about future events, there is no consensus on how sensitive municipal bond yields are to expectations about future tax rates. This study assesses that question by examining the relationship between the implicit tax rate and actual future tax rates.> Efficient markets theory predicts that the implicit tax ...
Journal Article
Mutual fund myths
Journal Article
Mutual funds, part II: fund flows and security returns
Mutual funds played a very small role in the financial system until the 1970s, before which ownership of financial instruments was dominated by commercial banks, thrift institutions, insurance companies, and pension funds. The financial system of the 1990s is not simply the system of the 1970s with more mutual funds, however. Evolution in financial laws and regulations, increasing global interactions, the rise of new financial instruments, major shifts in the structure and nature of financial institutions, and a change in the locus of risk-bearing from institutions to individuals have also ...
Journal Article
Stock market crashes: what have we learned from October 1987?
Perhaps the most widely held view of the Crash of 1987 is the Cascade Theory: the Crash emerged from the interaction of stock prices with new financial strategies such as program trading and portfolio insurance, which use new financial instruments including stock index options and futures. According to this view, a decline in stock prices initiated by fundamental factors led to an overreaction in stock index futures prices, due largely to portfolio insurance. This, in turn, created a negative spread between stock prices and futures prices, hence encouraging a further decline in stock prices ...
Discussion Paper
Pension accounting and corporate earnings: the world according to GAAP
This study?s underlying premise is that current pension plan accounting has two important negative effects. First, it distorts the measurement of earnings and net worth in the short run, as well as the pattern of earnings over future periods. Second, this distortion can send incorrect signals to investors about a firm?s health, resulting in the mispricing of a firm?s outstanding debt and equity instruments. The author demonstrates how these distortions are introduced, examines the magnitude of the distortions, and discusses proposals for reform.
Journal Article
Rules of the game: book review
In Trading & Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners, SEC Chief Economist Larry Harris has written a must-read for anyone interested in the good, the bad, and the ugly of securities trading.
Journal Article
Margin requirements, margin loans, and margin rates: practice and principles
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System establishes initial margin requirements under Regulations T, U, and X. Recent margin loan increases, both in aggregate value and relative to market capitalization, have rekindled the debate about using margin requirements as an instrument to affect the prices of common stocks. Proponents of a more active margin requirement policy see the regulations as instruments for affecting the level and volatility of stock prices by influencing investors' demand for common stocks. Others believe that the announcement effects of increased margin ...
Journal Article
Margin lending and stock market volatility
Margin loans have long been associated in the popular mind with instability in security markets, and the potential for margin lending to exacerbate the amplitude of cycles in stock prices has received considerable attention in the years since the Crash of 1929. Despite the many empirical studies of the association between margin loans or margin requirements and the volatility of stock returns, there has been no definitive answer, and the consensus among financial economists is that margin lending plays little, if any, role in shaping the probability distribution of returns on common stocks. ...