Stock Prices and Financial Analysts' Recommendations

The recommendations of a Canadian brokerage house are evaluated by a number of techniques. The results reveal that an investor following the recommendations would have achieved significantly positive abnormal returns, even after allowing for transactions cost.     

The Weekend Effect: Trading Patterns of Individual and Institutional Investors

In this paper, we document regularities in trading patterns of individual and institutional investors related to the day of the week. We find a relative increase in trading activity by individuals on Mondays. In addition, there is a tendency for individuals to increase the number of sell transactions relative to buy transactions, which might explain at least part of the weekend effect.     

Can Socialist Spaniards Ride Market Forces?

Spain's Socialist government looks set to inflict the kind of damage on its economy in its first few months of office that has taken President Mitterrand two years in France. Increasing liberalism following the removal of the Franco regime has been swept away by a welter of controls and state diktats, and the economic gains of the last few years look like vanishing.     

RESALE PRICE MAINTENANCE AND INTERLOCKING RELATIONSHIPS*

Dampening of interbrand as well intrabrand competition is often advanced to justify per se illegality of RPM. We analyze this argument in a context where rival manufacturers distribute their products through the same competing retailers. We show that RPM indeed limits the exercise of competition at both levels and can generate industry‐wide monopoly pricing. The impact on prices depends on the extent of potential competition at either level as well as on the parties' influence in determining the terms of the contracts. Our analysis sheds a new light on ongoing legal developments and is supported by recent empirical studies.     

Low-Risk Anomalies?

This paper shows that low-risk anomalies in the capital asset pricing model and in traditional factor models arise when investors require compensation for coskewness risk. Empirically, we find that option-implied ex ante skewness is strongly related to ex post residual coskewness, which allows us to construct coskewness factor-mimicking portfolios. Controlling for skewness renders the alphas of betting-against-beta and betting-against-volatility insignificant. We also show that the returns of beta- and volatility-sorted portfolios are driven largely by a single principal component, which in turn is explained largely by skewness.     

Imports in Keynesian Models*

This paper examines two main problems relating to the introduction of imports in the simple Keynesian model. First, imports need to be made a function of the aggregate demand components rather than income. Second, unless one assumes that intermediate imports are zero the solution of the simple Keynesian model will provide miltipliers which Overstate the exogenous demand change for domestic product.     

Non‐Governmental Public Norm Enforcement in Large Societies as a Two‐Stage Game of Voluntary Public Good Provision

In small groups, norm enforcement is achieved through mutual punishment and reward. In large societies, norms are enforced by specialists such as government officials. However, not every public cause is overseen by states, for instance those organized at the international level. This paper shows how nongovernmental norm enforcement can emerge as a decentralized equilibrium. As a first stage, individuals voluntarily contribute to a nongovernmental agency that produces an incentive system. The second stage is the provision of a public good on the basis of private contributions. The incentive system increases contributions by means of public approval or disapproval of behavior. It is shown that, even in large populations, nongovernmental norm enforcement can be supported in a noncooperative equilibrium of utility‐maximizing individuals. This result is in sharp contrast to those obtained in the standard situation of voluntary provision of an intrinsic public good which—without altruism or related motives—is eroded by free‐riding. Reliance on altruistic behavior is not required in supplying the second‐order public good “norm enforcement” in large societies.     

INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS OF THE TRANSITION: DETERMINANTS OF ENTERPRISE EFFICIENCY IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND HUNGARY

Firm level data are employed to estimate frontier productionfunctions for Czechoslovak industry in 1990 and for Hungarianindustry in 1991. In both countries there is evidence of inefficientfirms, with the distribution of efficiency characterized bya small number of inefficient outliers. Enterprise efficiencyis positively related to firm size and negatively to managerialeffort expended in lobbying for easier targets, but export orientationhas no effect on efficiency. Most importantly, in Hungary'smore reformed economy, efficient firms are more profitable,while profit redistribution by the center in Czechoslovakialed to an inverse relationship between efficiency and profitability.     

HORIZONTAL MERGERS,STRUCTURAL REMEDIES,AND CONSUMER WELFARE IN A COURNOT OLIGOPOLY WITH ASSETS*

Competition authorities sometimes require that firms divest some of their assets to rivals in order to allow a merger to take place. This paper extends the results of Farrell and Shapiro [1990a] and shows that, in the absence of technological synergies, a merger is highly unlikely to benefit consumers, even if it is subjected to appropriate structural remedies. For instance, a merger may ultimately lead to a lower price only if at least two different firms acquire the divested assets, and if the merging parties had relatively important pre‐merger market shares.