Organizations & Markets

In this paper, we analyze the behavior of equilibrium real interest rates in an identical consumer economy in which the preferences are represented by time additive logarithmic utility functions and production technologies are Cobb-Douglas with stochastic constant returns to scale. The following main results are established. (i) When there is no relative price uncertainty, it is shown that the equilibrium interest rate exhibits a mean reverting tendency. A nontrivial steady state distribution is found to exist for the equilibrium interest rate.

Corporate investment in an economy without a complete set of contingent claims markets has the characteristic of a public good in the sense that the stockholders' consumption plans cannot be separated from, but depend on, the specific investment plans of the firms. The purpose of this article is to develop an internal allocation mechanism capable of attaining production plans that are unanimously preferred by stockholders and that satisfy a natural notion of optimality applicable to the stock market economy.

In this paper we study the determination of forward foreign exchange rates. An exchange rate is the price of one currency in terms of another currency, and a forward rate is a contractual exchange rate established at a point in time for a transaction that will take place at the maturity date on the contract in the future. Well-organized forward markets exist for all major currencies of the world for various maturities, with the most active contract lengths being one, three, six, and twelve months.

This paper is a theoretical investigation of equilibrium forward and futures prices. We construct a rational expectations model in continuous time of a multigood, identical consumer economy with constant stochastic returns to scale production. Using this model we find three main results. First, we find formulas for equilibrium forward, futures, discount bond, commodity bond and commodity option prices.

The article presents several lender supply and borrower demand conditions for a leverage structure of interest rates. The paper presents a model of the credit transaction between individuals embedded in a competitive credit market. In this model, the individual has to decide on the optimal allocation of his initial investible capital K, among a risk asset with random rate of return R-1 available to all investors, a riskless asset with return s-1 and lending to or borrowing from another individual. Short sales of the risk asset are not permitted.

ln the framework of possibly incomplete asset markets, we derive observable conditions which are necessary.and sufficient for an agent's demand function to be compatible with the maximization of some monotone, concave, von Neumann-Morgenstern objective function. On the other hand, we demonstrate that, in general, as long as markets are incomplete, it is not possible to infer from the observed asset demand function whether the generating representation of preferences necessarily satisfies monotonicity, risk aversion, or the expected utility hypothesis.

This paper examines the hypothesis that the expected rate of return to speculation in the forward foreign exchange market is zero; that is, the logarithm of the forward exchange rate is the market's conditional expectation of the logarithm of the future spot rate. A new computationally tractable econometric methodology for examining restrictions on a k-step-ahead forecasting equation is employed. Using data sampled more finely than the forecast interval, we are able to reject the simple market efficiency hypothesis for exchange rates from the 1970s and the 1920s.

This paper discusses the structural equations, forecasting properties, dynamic characteristics, and economic policy implications of a quarterly econometric model of U.S. livestock and feedgrain markets. Quarterly, semi-annual, and annual endogenous variables are incorporated by allowing individual structural equations to be estimated and to enter into the solution of the model with different periodicities. Commodity prices are determined by market equilibrium conditions rather than by autoregressive and other time-series techniques.