The ratio of outstanding debt to gross national product in the United States has shown essentially no time trend over a period measured not in years but in decades. The research reported in this paper indicates that lenders' portfolio behavior exhibits characteristics that could provide...

This paper examines the relationship between U.S. corporations' management of their pension plans and their management of the more familiar aspects of corporate financial structure. The chief conclusion, on the basis of data for 7,828 pension plans sponsored by 1,836 companies and their...

Among the different kinds of economic behavior which may account for the familiar Fisherian relationship between nominal interest rates and expected price inflation, portfolio behavior is the most plausibly flexible in the short run. Since substitution into real assets is not a practical...

The three sections of this paper support three related conclusions. First, asset demands with the familiar properties of wealth homogeneity and linearity in expected returns follow as close approximations from expected utility maximizing behavior under the assumptions of constant relative risk...