Some factors determining municipal revenue bond interest costs

This paper tests for variations in risk premiums on municipal revenue bonds that are related to the geographic location of the issuer, the issue's second rating, and secondary collateral provisions. The empirical findings indicate that investors required risk premiums that depended on local economic conditions. Issuer borrowing costs were also shown to be related to factors that cause or reinforce segmentation of the tax-exempt bond market.     

Note,advance refunding and municipal bond market efficiency

This study uses the public announcement of an advance refunding to examine the informational efficiency of the secondary market for municipal bonds. The data show that bond yields respond quickly and in the direction predicted. The text discusses methodological considerations and the data sources used in the tests. The results of the study indicate that even for infrequently traded bonds, yields can be expected to reflect fully changes in default risk.     

Price elasticity and bid-ask price spreads in the treasury bond market

Typical analyses of transactions costs in the bond markets explain these costs in terms of yield, term to maturity, coupons, and issue size. However, these analyses do not recognize the price elasticity of bonds to interest rate movements, which provides better measures of market risk and bid-ask price spreads. Elasticity or duration and issue size together display stronger associations with bid-ask price spreads than do the traditional variables. The association is also less subject to multicollinearity of the independent variables. Finally, stepwise regressions show that coupon and yield data add no information about bid-ask price spreads not already impounded in the duration statistic. This casts doubt on the nonduration arguments often used to support these variables as separately meaningful in transactions cost analyses.     

Behavior of municipal bond default-risk premiums by maturity

Default-risk premiums have traditionally been considered to be an increasing function of time. More recently, a model has been developed which indicates that, under certain conditions, default-risk premiums are invariant to maturity. One study found significant differences in default-risk premiums for long-term corporate bonds and commercial paper. The hypothesis that default-risk premiums are invariant to maturity was tested using municipal bond data. Results indicate that risk premiums are not invariant to maturity.     

Experience seeking: A subjectivist perspective of consumption

The present research examines consumer behavior from a subjectivist perspective. In a phenomenological sense consumption consists of the generation of internal thoughts and|or sensations, which constitute the content of experience. The sociopsychological characteristics of consumers who primarily seek cognitive stimulation (cognition seekers), sensory stimulation (sensation seekers), novel stimulation (noveltry seekers), or are seekers of all three forms of experience (experience seekers) are delineated. Preliminary causal rationales for each type of consumption are put forward based on these findings.     

Statistical classification models applied to common stock analysis

The application of statistical classification techniques to various aspects of equity financing and returns performance has been an attractive and fairly prolific area of research in the last 10–15 yrs. The various aspects of equity analysis relevant to classification techniques are more diverse than fixed income analysis and, until recently, presented more interesting empirical as well as theoretical challenges.The purpose of this paper is to review and comment upon numerous classification studies related to several aspects of common stock analysis, and, in so doing, to provide a clear picture of the variety of application areas amenable to statistical classification techniques. These areas include (1) common stock investment categories; (2) price-earnings and return-risk equity classification; (3) information content and return performance; and (4) capital structure questions.     

Financial determinants of systematic risk in real estate investment trusts

Financial theory and empirical evidence suggest that a firm's systematic, or market related, risk is related to its financial conditions. This study empirically investigates the financial determinants of systematic risk for Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). The study is an examination of sample of 32 REITs for the period 1976–1978. The results indicate that systematic risk varies directly with financial leverage, business risk, and advisor fee. The explanatory power of the relationship between systematic risk and financial variables exceeds that of previous studies wherein firms were pooled across industry groups. The higher explanatory power observed even with limited data suggests that better estimates of coefficients of financial determinants of systematic risk may be obtained through analysis conducted on an industry by industry basis. Furthermore, such industry-specific analysis provides useful results to practicing financial managers in their financial policy considerations. With the knowledge of how the financial decisions affect the firm's systematic risk, a manager may be able to manipulate those variables so as to reduce the systematic risk for his or her firm and thus increase the market value of the firm's securities.     

Concept testing

This paper is a review of concept testing based on the published literature and a series of personal interviews with leading practitioners. While there is considerable agreement on the usefulness of concept testing, practitioners disagree on the best way to perform them. In addition to highlighting these disagreements, the paper covers general suggestions for improving concept testing.     

Exponents of multiattribute models

The effect of different exponents on the predictive ability of multiattribute models is examined. Survey data on 1202 individuals concerning their preferences for television shows is analyzed. The results indicate that the optimal power is not 1, and that consequently it may be somewhat more advantageous to improve on an already strong attribute than on relatively weak ones.     

Attitudes toward the corporation and the evaluation of social data

A scale is presented to measure attitudes about the social role of corporations, and to test for any association between attitudes and perceptions of the relevance of social data. Attitudes are found to be associated with perceptions of the relevance of social data. The relationship between attitudes and perceptions is also conditioned by the source of the social data.     

International bank lending: Political risk and portfolio diversification

The extent to which a large U.S. bank, all U.S. banks, and banks in the Group of Ten took account of political risk in their international country exposures in 1976 is tested using a simple portfolio diversification model. Assuming that political risks are important relative to economic risks, and that political risks are uncorrelated across countries, these banks' exposures should be negatively related to political risk indices. However, the portfolios of these banks appear to be related to political risk only insofar as political risk is roughly approximated by GNP per capita. International banks were not yet able to systematically vary their international portfolios with respect to political risk.     

Stability of mutual fund systematic risk statistics

Empirical data for 85 mutual funds are used to test the intertemporal stability of their systematic risk statistics. Reasons why the portfolios may be nonstationary are suggested. A random coefficient model developed by Theil [37] is employed to test for the stability of each fund's beta. The data suggest that some funds do exhibit a beta that is best described as being a random coefficient. However, the percentage of funds exhibiting this characteristic was not statistically different from the percentage of randomly created portfolios that exhibited a random beta coefficient. The findings of this study support the statistical models employed in two other recent studies [18,21] to test for the stability of beta. Yet, for mutual funds that do exhibit a random beta coefficient, the partitioning of the total risk of the portfolio return into systematic and unsystematic risk is no longer valid for explaining the total risk.     

Culture and organizational control

The influence of socio-cultural processes on organizational control is explored. The concepts of external and internal control are developed and related to several key dimensions of socio-cultural analysis which vary cross-culturally. Ethnographic evidence is presented to illustrate these different relationships.     

Model of management learning styles as a predictor of export behavior and performance

This paper reports the findings of a preliminary investigation of the relationships between the export performance and behavior of firms and the search for market information by the principal international marketing executives of these firms. The first part of the study deals with acquiring objective market information, and the second part is concerned with the acquisition of experiential market knowledge. While the findings of the experiential portion are inconclusive, the use of learning theory in this aspect of the work provides direction for future research in this area.     

Predictive power of joint space models constructed with composition techniques

A comparison of different methods of building joint spaces indicates significant differences across both product classes and modeling techniques in the ability to predict preferences for validation brands. Perceptual spaces constructed with discriminant analysis combined with vector representations of preference gave the best predictions across the product clases analyzed. Also, segment-specific perceptual spaces did not, in general, improve the predictive ability of the models studied.