An Economic Analysis of Interest Rate Swaps

Interest rate swaps, a financial innovation in recent years, are based upon the principle of comparative advantage. An interest rate swap is a useful tool for active liability management and for hedging against interest rate risk. The purpose of this paper is to provide a simple economic analysis of interest rate swaps. Alternative uses of and the appropriate valuation procedure for interest rate swaps are described.     

The Case Against Asset Revaluations

The upward revaluation of non-current assets is a common feature of contemporary accounting in Australia. This paper presents a case against the practice. The effects of revaluations are examined and possible reasons why firms revalue are considered. It is argued that asset revaluation is theoretically unsound, being inconsistent with the accounting structure within which it occurs. It is concluded that there are significant costs but few obvious benefits associated with revaluation.     

Arbitrage Chains

A privately informed trader will engage in costly arbitrage, that is, trade on his knowledge that the price of an asset is different from the fundamental value if: (1) his order does not move the price immediately to reflect the information; and (2) he can hold the asset until the date when the information is reflected in the price. We study a general equilibrium model in which all agents optimize. In each period, there may be a trader with a limited horizon who has private information about a distant event. Whether he acts on his information, and whether subsequent informed traders act, is shown to depend on the possibility of a sequence or chain of future informed traders spanning the event date. An arbitrageur who receives good news will buy only if it is likely that, at the end of his trading horizon, a subsequent arbitrageur's buying will have pushed up the expected price. We show that limited trading horizons result in inefficient prices, because informed traders do not act on their information until the event date is sufficiently close. We also show that limited horizons can arise because of the cost-carry associated with holding an arbitrage portfolio over an extended period of time.     

Management Buyout Proposals and inside Information

This paper explores stock price behavior surrounding withdrawn buyout proposals to determine whether managers' proposal announcements reveal any information which is unrelated to the efficiency gains associated with completed buyouts. On average, firms whose managers withdraw buyout proposals do not sustain significantly positive stock price effects unless they receive subsequent acquisition bids. In addition, managers of firms with completed buyouts are no more likely to have access to inside information than managers who withdrew proposals. I interpret this evidence as inconsistent with the notion that inside information commonly motivates management buyout proposals.     

Testing the Monopoly Union Model: A Stochastic Frontier Approach

This study applies stochastic frontier analysis to test the monopoly union model. This approach allows the use of a wider data set than has been previously employed. We fit a stochastic cost frontier to data from the U.S. manufacturing sector that includes exogenous sources of potential inefficiency including unionization. Our findings suggest that over the 1972–1982 time period, more heavily unionized industries in the U.S. manufacturing sector were more likely to operate off their labor demand curve. This result is inconsistent with the monopoly union model predictions.