No abstract

The debate about whether beta is dead or alive has heated up once again. We believe the empirical work supporting either side of the argument is limited because market frictions are not adequately addressed. This study clarifies the controversy about the issue by creating a new moving-average beta and analyzing two market anomalies: the turn-of-the-year and the Monday effects. What is discovered in this research is (1) that a fundamental source of the problem underlying the two types of market anomalies is the persistence of market frictions that retard the arbitrage process; (2) that beta is seriously ill if the effects of market frictions are ignored; and (3) that beta is alive and well if the effects of market frictions are accommodated. Also, we show, by using an optimal lead/lag structure, the moving-average beta provides significantly higher explanatory power for the turn-of the-year and the Monday effects than betas created from ordinary least squares regression and Scholes-Williams and Fama-French methods because the moving-average beta accommodates the effects of market frictions into the body of beta itself. This new type of beta, a moving-average beta, is demonstrated to be robust. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000.

This paper presents a modified method for inferring the effective bid‐ask spread from security returns in an eMicient market. The Modified Method removes from security returns the systematic effect of market movements and makes use of the equivalence properties of the moving average process and serial covariance function. The Modified Method is tested with the CRSP daily, weekly, and monthly returns data. The results show that the spread estimates are non‐negative and sample time‐interval independent. The results are compared with those of Roll (1984) and Amihud and Mendelson (1986).

Conventional wisdom suggests that preferred stock is a hybridsimilar to bonds in some respects and to common stock in others. This research affirms the conventional wisdom. Specifically, issuers of preferred stock appear to consider preferred to be equity in their adjustments toward their long-term debt-to-equity ratio. However, other balance sheet items including total asset size and asset composition indicate that preferred stock issuers are more like debt issuers than like common equity issuers.

This paper tests the firm size effect with two different approaches. First, the “messy” and “clean” methods of Fama and French are used; the firm size effect is found to remain but only after the regression residuals are analyzed. Then a security market plane and a proxy of it are defined and the proxy security market plane is used for testing. The results indicate that the firm size effect is reliably detected and statistically “explained” by a proxy security market plane for the sample period from July 1963 to June 1986.