In vitro shoot multiplication of Merton I. 793, a clonal apple rootstock, was achieved through terminal/axillary bud culture using Murashige and Skoog (MS) basal medium supplemented with 0.5-1.0 mg/L 6-benzyl amino purine (BA) and 0.1 mg/L indole-3-butyric acid (IBA). Time of collection of explants, duration of surface sterilents and growth regulators added in the medium influenced the survival...

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta E C O N O M I C R E V I E W Second Quarter 2002 D o financial markets offer higher rewards in the form of average returns for holding risks related to recessions and financial distress in addition to the risks from overall market movements? The answer to this question is related to the way financial economists understand the investment world. Fifteen years ago, f...

A core theme of social psychology is that perceivers can shape targets’ future behaviors through self-fulfilling prophecies. Self-fulfilling prophecies occur when perceivers’ false beliefs about targets initiate a sequence of events that ultimately cause targets to exhibit expectancy-consistent behaviors, thereby causing perceivers’ initially false beliefs to become true. This article reviews t...

As discussed in Merton (1993, Sections 5 and 6) and here in the section to follow, the effective delivery of many financial services depends critically on the credit-worthiness of the provider financial institution. Such service activities are said to be 'credit-sensitive'. The intermediary's credit standing can cause significant extemality-like effects on the various business activities of the...

We consider Merton’s portfolio optimization problem in a Black and Scholes market with non-Gaussian stochastic volatility of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type. The investor can trade in n stocks and a risk-free bond. We assume that the dependence between stocks lies in that they partly share the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes of the volatility. We refer to these as news processes, and interpret this as tha...

Despite the mixed evidence, recent empirical works highlight importance of idiosyncratic risk in stock market. On this basis, note elaborates an approach to price directly specific cost capital, both for scientific purposes and practitioner’s investment valuation. For extremely high leverage values, risky debt tends approximate unlevered capital. Exploiting a Merton model, we show simple soluti...