One measure of the health of the Social Security system is the difference between the market value of the trust fund and the present value of benefits accrued to date. How should present values be computed for this calculation in light of future uncertainties? We think it is important to use market value. Since claims on accrued benefits are not currently traded in financial markets, we cannot ...

Over the past decade, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a major concern for firms in appeasing the skepticism of stakeholder groups including shareholders, consumers, and organizational members at various levels (Donaldson and Preston, 1995; Kapstein, 2001). Significant changes have occurred in the way in which firms would like to be regarded, as evidenced by the increased report...

S ize and book-to-market ratios have emerged as the two prominent variables that are significantly related to stock returns. Fama and French [1992] find that stock returns are negatively related to size and positively related to book-to-market ratios. They also find that the relationship between stock returns and beta is not statistically significant. The Fama and French research caps earlier s...

This paper discusses the valuation of wage-indexed pension fund liabilities. Valuation by replication with market instruments is typically not possible as there are no wage-indexed assets. This paper discusses several methods to find a value in such incomplete markets and advocates utility-based valuation. This approach implies a simple adjustment on the discount factor that can be used to calc...

Based on a supply chain framework, we study the stocking decision of a downstream buyer who receives private demand information and has the incentive to influence her capital market valuation. We first characterize a market equilibrium under a general, single buy-back contract. We show that the buyer’s stocking decision can be distorted in equilibrium. Such a downstream stocking distortion hurt...

The investigation of investor sentiment and its relation to stock returns, volatility and asset valuation is the subject of considerable debate in many empirical researches. Using indirect sentiment measures, we provide evidence that sentiment levels and changes have important predictive power for stock returns. In addition, we find that most of our sentiment measures cause volatility rather th...

A decade of surging bicycle use has attracted little research seeking to measure bicycle utility, infrastructure preferences, and the tension between transportation budgets versus the demands of cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists. A review of the literature shows only one study applying non-market valuation tools to study this issue and demographic surveys tracking gender, age, and income hav...

In this paper, we provide a definition of Pareto equilibrium in terms of risk measures, and present necessary and sufficient conditions for equilibrium in a market with finitely many traders (whom we call “banks”) who trade with each other in a financial market. Each bank has a preference relation on random payoffs which is monotonic, complete, transitive, convex, and continuous; we show that t...

In a competitive dynamic durable good market where sellers have private information about quality, I identify certain ineffi ciencies that arise due to heterogeneity in buyers’ valuations. Even if the market induces dynamic sorting among sellers and all goods are eventually traded, ineffi ciency can arise because high valuation buyers buy early when low quality goods are sold, while high qualit...

The trading and investment decision processes in financial markets become ever more dependent on the use of valuation and risk models. In the case of risk management for instance, modelling practice has become quite homogeneous and the question arises as to the effect this has on the price formation process. Furthermore, sophisticated investors who have private information about the use and cha...