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On March 9, 1995, rumors began to circulate on Wall Street that a minor league baseball player was going to try his luck at shooting hoops for the Chicago Bulls [...]

The buffering hypothesis introduced by Peltzman (1991) posits that stricter regulation of business minimizes the risk of the regulated firm. If this hypothesis is supported, the regulatory structure of each state may influence the capital cost of the state's utilities. A study was conducted to test the buffering hypothesis. It differs from earlier research because it used an externally determined measure of regulatory environment, a large sample and a method controlling for time-series and cross-sectional autocorrelation. Results found support for the buffering hypothesis although only when input factor prices were increasing for the utilities. Causality tests found that the regulatory environment has an impact on systematic risk and vice-versa.

Scale economies, subadditivity and the inefficiency of US multinational banks (MNB) and domestic banks (DB) in plant and firm levels are compared. Results show that DBs and MNBs have different cost framework as evidenced by varying ray scale diseconomies. MNBs are also found to lord it over DBs at all sizes except at the smallest size level in subadditivity diseconomies. The cost structure of US banks indicate that their scale or size does does not affect their worldwide competitiveness.

The impact of the introduction of Rule 415 in 1983 on the investment banking industry is investigated. The regulation introduced shelf regulation of new securities as part of the SEC's efforts to simplify the system of taking new security issues to the market. Investment banking activity around the passage of the rule is analyzed by focusing on the industry's concentration of business during this period and by examining stock price reactions to tombstone announcements prior to the rule's introduction. The results are discussed.

Article compares the relative performance of bank holding companies and branch banking organizations. The study employs non-parametric frontiers from which measures of overall, allocative, technical, pure technical and scale efficiency can be derived. Frontier results show the two organizational forms to be statistically different. No differences were revealed in allocative efficiency. Branch banking was shown to be a more efficient organizational form than the bank holding company.

The effect of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA) on stock market valuation was investigated. The results showed that FIRREA produced substantial pe to the perception among market participants that higher capital standards would help address the problems pervading in the thrift industry.