Research Lab

The author argues that making markets work requires sound financial regulation, competition policy and policies to facilitate the transfer of technology and to encourage transparency, some fundamental issues neglected by the Washington consensus.

The following two articles, "Market Transparency: Who Wins and Who Loses?" by Robert Bloomfield and Maureen O'Hara and "Quote Disclosure and Price Discovery in Multipele Dealer FInancial Markets" by Mark D. Flood, Ronald Huisman, Kees G. Koedijk, and Ronald J. Mahieu are the first two experimental microstructure articles that the Review of Financial Studies (RFS) has published. We, the editors of the RFS, hope that they are not the last. Therefore I take the unconventional step of introducing the two articles.

We provide a comprehensive treatment of option pricing with particular emphasis on the valuation of American options on dividend-paying assets. We begin by reviewing principles for European contingent claims in a financial market in which the underlying asset price follows an Ito process and the interest rate is stochastic. Then this analysis is extended to the valuation of American contingent claims. In particular, the early exercise premium and the delayed exercise premium representations of the American option price are presented.

In this paper we develop a residual-income model showing how taxes on dividends affect the relative valuation of retained earnings versus contributed equity, as well as the value of expected future earnings. Tests of predictions from our model for a sample of Compustat firms from 1975-94 suggest that overall firm value, and the relative valuation weights investors assign to retained earnings, contributed equity, and current earnings, all critically depend on dividend taxes.

The paper provides early evidence on the informativeness of commodity price risk measures required by the Securities and Exchange Commission's new market risk disclosure rules (SEC 1997). I use existing disclosures of oil and gas producers (O&G) to obtain proxies for the tabular and sensitivity analysis disclosures required by the new SEC rules. I find that proxies for the tabular and the sensitivity analysis format are significantly associated with O&G firms' stock return sensitivities to oil and gas price movements.

This paper lays out alternative equity valuation models that involve forecasting for finite periods and shows how they are related to each other. It contrasts dividend discounting models, discounted cash flow models, and "residual income" models based on accrual accounting. It shows that some models that are apparently different yield the same valuation. It gives the general form of the terminal value calculation in these models and shows how this calculation serves to correct errors in the model.

Recent research on business investment decisions suggests that real investment in plant and equipment is quite sensitive to changes in the user cost of capital, pointing to the possibility that long-run changes in tax policy may have a significant impact on an economy's capital stock. Indeed, many countries have at times adopted investment tax incentives to stimulate investment. The prevalence of investment incentives suggests that local policy-makers believe these are effective in increasing investment at a reasonable cost in terms of lost revenue.

The effects of tax reform on corporate financial decisions help determine whether reform will increase capital formation and simplify the tax system. This paper describes the effects of fundamental tax reform on corporate tax planning and summarizes economists' knowledge of the magnitude of these effects. We analyze both income tax reform, consisting of integrating the corporate and personal income taxes, and moving to a broad-based consumption tax. As prototypes of reform, we use the U.S.