MARKET STRUCTURE, PROGRAM DIVERSITY, AND RADIO AUDIENCE SIZE

This paper examines the relationships among radio station listenership, the number of program formats, and the number of stations. These relationships are statistically significant and consistent with theory, but the interrelationships are numerically small. The results imply that proposals by the federal Communications Commission and Congress to relax ownership restrictions must induce substantial changes in station numbers in order to noticeably increase programming diversity. Merely modest changes in these numbers will have only small diversity effects. The paper's results also imply that merely mandating the number of formats in a market may not be in the interests of listeners.     

SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS IN BENEFIT COST ANALYSIS: A KEY TO INCREASED USE AND ACCEPTANCE

"We must insist that all empirical studies offer convincing evidence of inferential sturdiness."
Sensitivit     

The Nation's Private Wealth -Some New Calculations for Australia*

This paper has two related purposes. The first is to bring together and review a number of earlier studies which have attempted to estimate the value of Australia's privately held wealth stock. The second is to present new estimates covering the 1980s. based partly on these earlier studies, which value all major components of the nation's private wealth at their market value, or a close approximation. The calculations reported here represent the first aggregate Australian wealth series for which comprehensive market valuation can be claimed. Australia's aggregate non-human private wealth was found to be $794 billion at 30 June 1985. The series as a whole suggests that previous estimates have significantly under-valued Australia's wealth. At 30 June 1981 the Helliwell-Boxall (1978) study. updated by the Reserve Bank, reported a value of $294.7 billion, while Williams (1983) gave a value of $360.5 billion. The corresponding estimate for the new series is $532.5 billion. Because the new calculations presented here value wealth by component. it is possible to identify omissions and valuation differences which account for most of the variation between these estimates.     

Efficient Funds in a Financial Market with Options: a New Irrelevance Proposition

Under the same assumptions that Ross used to assert the existence of an efficient fund (on which a spanning set of options can be written) we prove that almost any portfolio is an efficient fund. From a constructive point of view, a randomly chosen vector of portfolio weights yields an efficient fund. When the Ross assumptions are relaxed, a limited notion of efficiency-maximal efficiency-is the best attainable. The maximally efficient funds are also everywhere dense in the portfolio space. Some implications are discussed and illustrative examples given.     

Merger Announcements and Insider Trading Activity: An Empirical Investigation

This paper provides evidence of excess returns earned by investors in acquired firms prior to the first public announcement of planned mergers. The study is distinguished from earlier merger studies in its use of daily holding period returns for the 194 firms sampled. The results confirm statistically what most traders already know. Impending merger announcements are poorly held secrets, and trading on this nonpublic information abounds. Specifically, leakage of inside information is a pervasive problem occurring at a significant level up to 12 trading days prior to the first public announcement of a proposed merger.     

Programming Solutions to Capital Rationing Problems

Mathematical programming approaches to the choice of capital expenditure projects under conditions of funds constraint have been widely advocated in the literature of finance. The present paper takes exception to such suggestions, and concludes that programming is not only excessively costly and complex for most practical applications, but is frequently incorrect in the decisions it implies. A technique for allocating funds via an adjusted Excess Present Value Index is developed and proposed as a superior analytical framework.     

ACCOUNTING FOR POPULATION AGEING IN TAX MICROSIMULATION MODELLING BY SURVEY REWEIGHTING*

This paper investigates the use of sample reweighting, in a behavioural tax microsimulation model, to examine the implications for government taxes and expenditure of population ageing in Australia. First, a calibration approach to sample reweighting is described, producing new weights that achieve specified population totals for selected variables. Second, the performance of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) weights provided with the 2000–2001 Survey of Income and Housing Cost (SIHC) was examined and it was found that reweighting does not improve the simulation outcomes for the 2001 situation, so the original ABS weights were retained for 2001. Third, the implications of changes in the age distribution of the population were examined, based on population projections to 2050. A ‘pure’ change in the age distribution was examined by keeping the aggregate population size fixed and changing only the relative frequencies in different age‐gender groups. Finally, the effects of a policy change to benefit taper rates in Australia were compared for 2001 and 2050 population weights. It is suggested that this type of exercise provides an insight into the implications for government income tax revenue and social security expenditure of changes in the population, indicating likely pressures for policy changes.     

Does Weak Governance Cause Weak Stock Returns? An Examination of Firm Operating Performance and Investors' Expectations

We investigate Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick's (2003) finding that firms with weak shareholder rights exhibit significant stock market underperformance. If the relation between poor governance and poor returns is causal, we expect that the market is negatively surprised by the poor operating performance of weak governance firms. We find that firms with weak shareholder rights exhibit significant operating underperformance. However, analysts' forecast errors and earnings announcement returns show no evidence that this underperformance surprises the market. Our results are robust to controls for takeover activity. Overall, our results do not support the hypothesis that weak governance causes poor stock returns.     

Consumers and Competition in Health Care: The Case of Denturism

Denturism is the making and fitting of dentures directly for the public by nondentists. It is an example of potential competitive entry in a health services market and, like other such examples, its economic benefits must be weighed against any threat to the public health and safety. This article examines evidence relating to the economic benefits to consumers of legalizing denturism. Conservative estimates are presented of the economic benefits to consumers that would accrue under alternative institutional arrangements. Under several such arrangements it was found that the value of benefits is of the same order of magnitude as total government expenditures on dental services.