In Investors and Markets, Nobel Prize-winning financial economist William Sharpe shows that investment professionals cannot make good portfolio choices unless they understand the determinants of asset prices. But until now asset-price analysis has largely been inaccessible to everyone except...

The first part of this paper provides a historical perspective on bank risks. Five-year moving average measures of total risk, market risk, and nonmarket risk are computed for an index of New York banks from 1929-1975 and for an index of outside New York banks from 1950-1976.We use a carefully...

This paper provides a formal setting for the analysis of the capital adequacy of an institution with deposits insured by a third party. An insured depositor has a claim against the institution and a contingent claim against the insurer. This paper analyzes the effect of the riskiness of the...

This paper considers a world in which pension funds may default, the cost of the associated risk of default is not borne fully by the sponsoring corporation, and there are differential tax effects. The focus is on ways in which the wealth of the shareholders of a corporation sponsoring a pension...

The characteristic line of a security or portfolio relates its rate of return to that of a "market portfolio." Several investigators have suggested the desirability of obtaining such a line by minimizing the sum of the absolute deviations rather than the sum of the squared deviations around the...

This paper describes the advantages of using a particular model of the relationships among securities for practical applications of the Markowitz portfolio analysis technique. A computer program has been developed to take full advantage of the model: 2,000 securities can be analyzed at an...