This paper reports estimates of overall and product specific economies of scale, as well as, economies of scope for the main outputs of the life insurance industry. In addition, the paper presents a number of structural tests of the production technology. The results indicate that the estimated...

This paper identifies sources of asset returns (stock returns and interest rates) and inflation relations. We find that the relation between asset returns and inflation is driven by three types of disturbances to the economy. We interpret them as due to supply disturbances and two types of...

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange reduced the size of its S&P 500 futures contract when it reduced the multiplier from 500 to 250 and increased the minimum tick from 0.05 to 0.10 on November 3, 1997. This is a rare major change in a very successful contract's specifications. We analyze effects of...

In this paper, we suggest the trade-off model to explain the choice of debt maturity. This model is based on balancing between risk and reward of using shorter-term loans. Shorter-term loans have cost advantage over, but incur higher refinancing and interest rate risk than longer-term loans....

This study adopts Hamilton and Susmel's (1994) Markov-switching ARCH (hereafter SWARCH) model to examine the volatility of the valued-weighted Taiwan Stock Index (hereafter TAIEX) returns. We also conduct sensitivity tests on comparison observations of Dow Jones and Nikkei stock indices. Our...

This study examines whether the choice of amortization life for purchased goodwill is predictive of the firm's post-acquisition earnings levels, given that shorter lives could lead to a dilution in earnings. Our findings support this interpretation. Further, consistent with Andrade (2001), we...

We investigate the potential uncertainty-reducing role of accounting information in the context of contingent Superfund liability valuation. We first develop theoretical arguments for the way reduction of uncertainty regarding these contingent liabilities is expected to affect security prices....

Analyst forecast information is collected for firms following their IPOs and is used in an examination of subsequent seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). Consistent with information asymmetry arguments, the analysis indicates that a larger percentage of firms conducting SEOs within three years of...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the inter-temporal trading behavior of informed and uninformed investors. We estimate a variation of the market microstructure model developed in Easley, Keifer, O'Hara, and Paperman (1996) and document the day-of-the-week pattern in informed and...

This paper evaluates the ability of US-based Asian mutual fund managers in coping with the 1997 Asian financial crisis. We find that the actively managed mutual funds under-perform with respect to the market portfolio by 1.71 percent in average monthly return. Such poor performance is caused by...