Corporate Financial Policy in Segmented Securities Markets

The attempt to incorporate securities market imperfections other than proportional taxes within a mean-variance security valuation context has met with modest success. Lintner 5, however, has recently considered imperfections by the device of segmented markets. His paper has motivated the following taxonomy. Securities markets are defined as weakly segmented if some of the securities in at least one market are available to some investors but not to others, partially segmented if the sets containing both investors and available securities in each market are disjoint, and completely segmented if additionally the sets of firms in each market are disjoint. Segmented markets effectively relax the separation property of mean-variance equilibrium models (i.e., all investors, irrespective of differences in present wealth or preferences, divide their wealth between the same two mutual funds; one is risk-free and the other is the market portfolio of risky securities). This property unfortunately implies that each investor must hold a portion of every available risky security. This is empirically unrealistic, primarily due to restrictions on borrowing and shorting and scale economies in security analysis and brokerage. Moreover, even in the absence of these complications, ownership of nonmarketable assets, nonhomogeneous beliefs, or breakdown of the separation property due to tastes or nonnormality will motivate individuals to hold different risky portfolios. The device of segmented markets embodies in extreme form these obstacles to diversification and portfolio similarity.