Some deny that, but yes it has. The effect you achieve depends on PR of your page, PR of the page you are linking to and the relevancy (theme relation) between the two pages. (If your page has a higher PR than the page you are linking to, and that page ranks higher than yours for a certain search term, you can improve your ranking for that term. Usually the effect is clearly visible for a limited time and tends to decrease then, but at the end you will see a slight improvement of your ranking.) Usually the effect is positive, in theory it could be negative too, but I personally never observed that.
Not unless you are linking to a bad neighbourhood or have a large number of links on one page. I don't know what monfis was thinking when he answered the question but sites link to each other all the time, in fact its the basis if the internet, hence the nickname "web", its a web of interlinked pages...
Hi seo ranter, I understood the question as "do outbound links have an effect on MY OWN page rankings" and to my experience, yes they have. Of cause do they have for the page you are linking to, this is no issue to discuss.
possible effects that might occur when linking to other sites: 1- positive: if the sites are quality and relevant, if you have greater amount of IBLs than OBLs 2- negative: if you're linking to a bad neighbor and FFA directories
Misinformation.... the internet is full of it. If you link to a website relevant to yours and that site isn't using any black hat methods or doing anything wrong in the big G's eyes then it is completely fine. Pagerank for the most part has nothing to do with SERPs, as many would like you to believe. The only effect have many outbound links is that you'll give less PR juice per link from that page. Your entire response really just contradicts itself.