First Quarter (2003)

Sanjiv R. Das, Murali Jagannathan, and Atulya SarinIn this paper we examine 52,322 financing rounds in 23,208 unique firms, over the period 1980 through 2000 by venture and buyouts funds and estimate the probability of exit, time to exit, exit multiples and the expected gains from private equity investments. The expected multiple (after accounting for… Read more

Renato Staub and Jeffrey Diermeier When investing in alternative assets, such as private equity or natural resources – which may be “locked-up” for prolonged periods of time – the question of compensation for illiquidity becomes important. No rational investor will choose the illiquid over the liquid asset unless he gets compensated for his loss of… Read more

Arik Ben Dor, Ravi Jagannathan, and Iwan Meier We illustrate the use of return-based style analysis in practice using several examples. We demonstrate the importance of selecting the right style benchmarks and how the use of inappropriate style benchmarks may lead to wrong conclusions. We show how asset turnover and style graphs over time can… Read more

Andrew W. Lo, Constantin Petrov, and Martin Wierzbicki We introduce liquidity into a mean-variance portfolio optimization framework by defining several measures of liquidity and then constructing three-dimensional mean-variance-liquidity frontiers in three ways – liquidity filtering, liquidity constraints, and a mean-variance-liquidity objective function. We show that portfolios close to each other on the traditional mean-variance efficient… Read more

Mark Rubinstein This is the first in a series of articles to appear in this Journal on the history of significant ideas in financial economics. Perhaps the most basic of these is the idea of present value. Early contributors include Johan de Witt (1671), the famous mathematician Abraham de Moivre (1725), and the famous scientist… Read more

Jack L. Treynor Inflation entails a loop running from prices to wages and back again from wages to prices. Change in inflation rates result from two types of intervention in that otherwise closed loop. Inflation surprise intervenes when the labor productivity of the marginal plant, hence the real wage, turns out different from what negotiators… Read more

Tibor Janosi, Robert Jarrow, and Yildiray Yildirim This paper uses a reduced form credit risk model to estimate default probabilities implicit in equity prices. For a cross-section of firms, a time-series regression of monthly equity returns is estimated. We show that it is feasible to infer the firm’s probability of default implicit in equity returns… Read more