Buyout candidates and their investment banking relationships: An empirical analysis of returns adjoining buyout offers

Previous studies document a significant positive price reaction at the proposal of a buyout offer. In this study the author examines the influence of investment banking relationships on target firms associated with buyout offers. The results support the hypothesis that knowledge of an impending buyout manifests itself before a buyout’s public announcement. The evidence supports the hypothesis that investment bankers use different strategies before a buyout.     

Is the Electronic Open Limit Order Book Inevitable?

Under fairly general conditions, the article derives the equilibrium price schedule determined by the bids and offers in an open limit order book. The analysis shows: (1) the order book has a small-trade positive bid-ask spread, and limit orders profit from small trades; (2) the electronic exchange provides as much liquidity as possible in extreme situations; (3) the limit order book does not invite competition from third market dealers, while other trading institutions do; (4) If an entering exchange earns nonnegative trading profits, the consolidated price schedule matches the limit order book price schedule.     

The behavioral perspective model of purchase and consumption: From consumer theory to marketing practice

The Behavioral Perspective Model of purchase and consumption (BPM) portrays the rate at which consumer behaviors take place as a function of the relative openness of the setting in which they occur and the informational and hedonic reinforcement available in or promised by the setting. Each of eight combinations of contingencies based on these explanatory variables is uniquely related to a specific mode of observed consumer behavior. By providing an environmental perspective on consumer behavior, the model makes a critical contribution to the development of contemporary consumer research that frequently decontextualizes its subject matter. It also presents an innovative conceptualization of the nature of marketing strategies.     

Pricing Options on an Asset with Bernoulli Jump-Diffusion Returns

The price movements of certain assets can be modeled by stochastic processes that combine continuous diffusion with discrete jumps. This paper compares values of options on assets with no jumps, jumps of fixed size, and jumps drawn from a lognormal distribution. It is shown that not only the magnitude but also the direction of the mispricing of the Black-Scholes model relative to jump models can vary with the distribution family of the jump component. This paper also discusses a methodology for the numerical valuation, via a backward induction algorithm, of American options on a jump-diffusion asset whose early exercise may be profitable. These cannot, in general, be accurately priced using analytic models. The procedure has the further advantage of being easily adaptable to nonanalytic, empirical distributions of period returns and to nonstationarity in the underlying diffusion process.     

Econometric Cost Structure Estimates for Cellular Telephony in the United States

This article estimates economies of scale for a sample of five cellular telephony firms in the United States. We reject constant returns to scale for all but the smallest firm studied; the remaining firms exhibit decreasing returns to scale. This finding suggests that scale economies cannot be used to justify the current regulated duopoly structure of United States cellular markets.     

Current Issues in the Analysis of Commercial Real Estate

This paper identifies and discusses a number of current issues regarding our understanding of commercial real estate markets. These issues include: 1) accurate estimation of the quantity and location of our nation's commercial space; 2) an understanding of the linkage between the space and capital markets for commercial real estate; 3) identification of the macroeconomic factors that affect the rate of return on commercial property and whether local market factors also affect the rate of return; 4) problems associated with measuring the return characteristics of equity investments in commercial property (including measures of the diversification benefits and inflation-hedging abilities of this asset class); 5) a better understanding of rental markets, including good measures of changes in effective rents over time; and 6) examination of the rationale for ownership of commercial space by corporate users. This paper reviews recent research related to these questions and suggests future research that should prove to be fruitful.     

Further Ambiguity When Performance Is Measured by the Security Market Line

This paper employs the optimality conditions for expected utility and mean-variance portfolio problems to examine the ambiguities associated with the security market line criterion both at a point in time and through time. At a point in time, we show that the security market line criterion can be irrelevant, even in meanvariance economies. In a multiperiod setting, we show that the analysis of performance based on portfolio choice is inconsistent with the analysis based on return generating models. Empirical work suggests that the inconsistency can lead to dramatically different estimates of a security's required return.