Previous research had shown that owning thoroughbred racehorses tends to provide a negative financial return. Yet people continue to purchase and own them. Obviously, rational owners must obtain utility from racing in non financial ways to entice them to willingly pay a premium to enter the game...

Previous research has concluded that prespecified asset allocations used by many Section 529 college savings plans are not only suboptimal, but that they are also so conservative that many investors would do better by avoiding such plans entirely. Recent changes in the tax code and in the rules...

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...

Most economists take it for granted that a price mechanism is usually the most effective means of resource allocation. This paper compares two methods of allocating resources in the thoroughbred racing market: a price mechanism and bureaucratic restrictions. It is shown that a simple price...

Previous research has established that stock returns tend to be low on Mondays and high on Fridays, and suggests that stock returns on Friday the thirteenth may be less than on other Fridays. We find that in a longer time series than previously studied, this difference is no longer significant...

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...

This paper develops two models of the money marketmutual fund maturity decision. The first assumes thatmarkets are efficient but that transactions are costly. Thesecond model relies on a survey of fund managers to selectvariables that might permit exploiting perceivedprofit opportunities....

Most empirical work examining the intertemporal mean-variance relationship in stock returns has tended to use relatively simple specifications of the mean and especially of the conditional variance. We augment the information set to include economic variables that other researchers have found to...

Most asset pricing models postulate a positive relationship between a stock portfolio's expected returns and risk, which is often modeled by the variance of the asset price. This paper uses GARCH-in-mean models to examine the relationship between mean returns on a stock portfolio and its...

Most asset pricing models postulate a positive relationship between a stock portfolio's expected returns and risk, which is often modeled by the variance of the asset price. This paper uses GARCH-in-mean models to examine the relationship between mean returns on a stock portfolio and its...