Food and feeding habits determine the position of animals within food webs, and hence largely define their ecological role. This is also true for marine mammals, whose food and feeding habits have been reported in numerous published accounts based on analyses of stomach contents, or scats, or from direct observations, or inferred by indirect methods such as isotope ratios (Orstrom et al. 1993).
The majority of the available quantitative studies pertain, however, to small numbers of individuals, andlor a small fraction of a species range, both of which usually cannot be used for direct inferences involving the entire (global or oceanwide) distribution areas ofthese species. Some authors have attempted, on the other hand, to summarize scattered data on the food and feeding habits of mammals species (notably Evans 1987, and Klinowska 1991 for cetaceans, and King 1983 and Bonner 1990 for pinnipeds), but they have done so on a broad qualitative basis, precluding the direct use oftheir summaries for trophic modelling, or comparative studies.
The 1970s brought dramatic changes in the size and composition of US household sector wealth. Figure 1 showsthat aggregate household net worth as a fraction of GDP fell by 25% during the 1970s, before recovering again toits late 1960svalue. Figure 2 shows that the aggregate household portfolio sawa 20% shift away from equity and into real estate during the 1970s.
The pricing of financial distress or default risk is one of the fundamental questions in financial economics. In a recent study, Vassalou and Xing (2004) measure default risk using a default likelihood indicator (DLI) computed according to the Black Scholes (1973) and Merton (1974) option pricing frame work and show that stocks more likely to default earn a higher return than otherwise similar stocks.
Their finding represents a puzzle for the literature on financial distress or default risk, as most recent research documents the opposite relation (see Dichev (1998), Griffi n and Lemmon (2002), Garlappi, Shu, and Yan (2007), Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi (2007) and George and Hwang (2007)). We resolve this puzzle by relating Vassalou and Xingms finding to the short term return reversal first documented by Jegadeesh (1990) and Lehman (1990). In addition, we analyze a concrete channel through which a liquidity shock might occur on a stock which in turn causes the return reversal.
