John G. Cragg and Burton G. Malkiel - 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 the 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. More than a decade has passed since the data were originally collected, and so they may not represent the most up-to-date practices. There are, however, important advantages to our having waited a considerable period before publishing our results.