The measurement of the "average" price of common stocks is a matter of widespread interest. Investors want to know how "the market" is doing, and to be able to compare their returns with a meaningful benchmark. Money managers often have their compensation tied to performance, typically measured...

Some observers have argued that the run-up in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock price index during the 1990s was due to irrational exuberance rather than market fundamentals. This article presents evidence that the case for market fundamentals is stronger than it appears on the surface. Nathan...

I analyze a model in a simple representative-agent economy with one risky and one riskless asset, populated by habit-forming consumer-investors. These consumer-investors exhibit nonaddictive habit formation in the sense that the current consumption rate of the consumer-investors can fall below...

Researchers have reported mispricing in index options markets. This study further examines the efficiency of the S&P 500 index options market by testing theoretical pricing relationships implied by no-arbitrage conditions. The effect of a traded stock basket, Standard and Poor's Depository...

This paper tests the approach of Madan and Milne (1994) and its extension in Abken, Madan, and Ramamurtie (1996) for pricing contingent claims as elements of a separable Hilbert space. We specialize the Hilbert space basis to the family of Hermite polynomials and test the model on S&P 500 index...

We examine the distribution of returns in new industries to determine whether stocks in new industries are similar to lottery tickets. We focus on one characteristic of lottery tickets: negative expected returns. We examine data from the United States on sellers of own-brand personal computers,...

A change in executive leadership is a significant event in the life of a firm. This study investigates an important consequence of a CEO turnover: a change in equity volatility. We develop three hypotheses about how changes in CEO might affect stock price volatility, and test these hypotheses...

Large swings in stock prices are sometimes associated with a redirection of household savings flows. Such changes can lead to transitory increases in M2 as investors temporarily “park” funds in depository assets while they determine the funds’ ultimate destination. The authors find that,...