Expectations and the Structure of Share Prices

This monograph investigates a number of interrelated questions about the formation of expectations and the pricing of capital assets. Central to the empirical work is a unique body of expectations data collected over the decade of the 1960s. The book first describes the data and then examines a number of questions regarding consensus, accuracy, and completeness of the forecasts as well as the underlying process that appears to generate the forecasts. The book then turns to the development of a restatement of financial-asset valuation theory and goes on to use the expectations data we have collected to test the model. We find that our data permit far more satisfactory tests of valuation models than have been possible before and that they help provide important insights into the structure of security prices. Because we believe that these data will be helpful to other researchers, we have published the data themselves in as much detail as our respondents would permit.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.