The emergence of an active interest rate swap market has transformed the nature of corporate debt issuance and risk management. Many firms nowadays routinely use swaps to adjust their ratio of fixed to floating rate debt when there is a change in management's view on interest rates. For...

We use university endowment funds to study the relationship between asset allocation decisions and performance in multiple asset class portfolios. Although endowments differ substantially in asset class composition, policy portfolio returns and volatilities are remarkably similar across the...

Recent changes in reserves or reserve/production ratios are often cited as evidence of hypothesized economic changes in petroleum markets. However, the technology of petroleum production and the fact that international petroleum markets are not perfectly competitive combine to render incorrect...

Firms often contract to deliver commodities at prices established before production costs are known. If the amount sold is a function of the quoted price, then the expected benefit profit per unit sold is not, in general, the difference between the unit cost estimate and the price quotation, but...