This paper analyzes the joy of giving bequest motive in which the utility obtained from leaving a bequest depends only on the size of the bequest. It exploits the fact that this formulation can be interpreted as a reduced form of an altruistic bequest motive to derive a relation between the...

Particularly since the passage of ERISA, institutional investors have increasingly been willing to consider potential investments that traditionally have been considered highly speculative. Indeed, some institutional investors now routinely use options and futures, instruments that formerly were...

The process of clearing and settling trades involves risks to both investors and the brokerage firms that represent them. Because of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) has appointed a technical committee to explore the problems of clearing and settlement in a global...

A welfare analysis of a simple noisy rational expectations model is carried out. It is shown that the more information prices convey, the worse off everybody can be. However, the equilibrium where everybody is uninformed may not be Pareto optimal: imposing a tax on information gathering which...

Two of the most widely used statistical techniques for analyzing discrete economic phenomena are discriminant analysis (DA) and logit analysis. For purposes of parameter estimation, logit has been shown to be more robust than DA. However, under certain distributional assumptions both procedures...

Recent work on the price behavior of French common stocks concluded that the evidence is consistent with equity pricing according to the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). In this paper we re-examine the evidence on the risk-return characteristics of French equity and show that the estimated...