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Journal Article
Stocks, bonds, options, futures, and portfolio insurance: a rose by any other name
Trading volume and open interest in options and futures contracts on stock indices, equities, and interest rate instruments traded on world exchanges have experienced remarkable growth. However, this growth has been accompanied by controversy about the proper role of financial derivatives and the potential for abuse. Prominent attention has been given to losses by major corporations, broker-related short-term mutual funds, and municipal agencies.> The public debate about "derivatives" has promoted the impression that the heart of the problem has been a proliferation of brand new ways of ...
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
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
Are stock returns different over weekends? a jump diffusion analysis of the \"weekend effect\"
The distribution of returns on common stocks is, arguably, one of the most widely studied financial market characteristics. The performance of stock prices during breaks in trading has received considerable attention in recent years, especially since the advent of "circuit breakers" designed to create stability when markets are chaotic. This study examines the distribution of daily returns on five popular stock price indices, with a special emphasis on the difference between returns over weekends and returns over adjacent intraweek trading days. The author revisits the "weekend effect" in ...
Journal Article
Security loans at banks and nonbanks: Regulation U
Over the years, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has established margin regulations to limit purpose loans by banks and nonbanks to broker-dealers or other borrowers. In this study, the author reviews those regulations affecting security lending by banks and nonbanks. He examines data on security loans during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as in recent years, noting that security lending by banks and borrowing by broker-dealers often diverge-the popular notion that the two are tightly linked is not correct-and that during the 1920s the volume of loans by banks to brokers may ...
Journal Article
Anomalies in option pricing: the Black-Scholes model revisited
In 1973, Myron Scholes and the late Fischer Black published their seminal paper on option pricing. The Black-Scholes model revolutionized financial economics in several ways: It contributed to our understanding of a wide range of contracts with option-like features, and it allowed us to revise our understanding of traditional financial instruments. This article addresses the question of how well the Black-Scholes model of option pricing works. The goal is to acquaint a general audience with the key characteristics of a model that is still widely used, and to indicate the opportunities for ...
Journal Article
Is margin lending marginal?
Working Paper
Tax-exempt bonds really do subsidize municipal capital!
The traditional view of municipal finance holds that the federal tax-exemption of interest payments by state and local (municipal) governments provides a capital cost subsidy to municipal investment equal to the difference between interest rates on taxable and tax-exempt bonds. Recently, a new view has emerged which argues that tax-exemption plays a minor role, if any, in shaping municipal investment decisions. According to this new view, communities will use tax finance at the margin except in the unusual case where only debt finance is used. Thus, tax-exemption is an intramarginal (lump ...
Journal Article
The municipal bond market, part II: problems and policies
Why does Congress allow municipal interest payments to be exempted from federal income taxes in the face of a very large chronic deficit in the federal budget, even though no constitutional provision requires that this tax policy continue? The rhetoric of tax exemption is philosophical, appealing to notions of appropriate intergovernmental relations and, in particular, to the doctrine of reciprocal immunity: no level of government should use its taxing authority to impose harm on another level. ; But the true force behind tax exemption is that it provides states and local governments with a ...
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.