When the price process for a long-lived asset is of a mixed jump–diffusion type, pricing of options on that asset by arbitrage is not possible if trading is allowed only in the underlying asset and a riskless bond. Using a general equilibrium framework, we derive and analyze option prices when the underlying asset is the market portfolio with discontinuous returns. The premium for the risk of jumps and the diffusion risk forms a significant part of the prices of the options. In this economy, an attempted replication of call and put options by the Black–Scholes type of trading strategies may require substantial infusion of funds when jumps occur. We study the cost and risk implications of such dynamic hedging plans.
We test whether banks’ investment and financing policies can be explained by tax status. We document changes in bank holdings of municipal bonds in response to changes in tax rules relating to deductibility of interest expense. We also document an association between banks’ marginal tax rates and their investment and financing decisions, which is consistent with the existence of tax clienteles. However, banks do not sort themselves perfectly into investment and financing clienteles because of adjustment costs. We posit specific types of transaction-cost impediments to tax planning, and document that banks apparently trade off these costs against tax-planning benefits.
The procedure for opening stocks on the NYSE appears to affect price volatility. An analytical framework for assessing the magnitude of the structurally induced volatility is presented. The ratio of variance of open-to-open returns to close-to-close returns is shown to be consistently greater than one for NYSE common stocks during the period 1982 through 1986. The greater volatility at the open is not attributable to the way in which public information is released since both the open-to-open return and the close-to-close return span the same period of time. Instead, the greater volatility appears to be attributable to private information revealed in trading and to temporary price deviations induced by specialist and other traders. The implied cost of immediacy at the open is significantly higher than at the close. Other empirical evidence in this article documents the volume of trading at the open, the time delays between the exchange opening and the first transaction in a stock, the difference in daytime volatility versus overnight volatility, and the extent to which volatility is related to trading volume.
No analytic solution exists for the valuation of American options written on futures contracts and foreign currencies for which early exercise may be optimal. This article formulates the American option valuation problem in economically and mathematically meaningful ways. This enables us to derive valuation formulas for American options. The properties associated with the optimal exercise boundary are examined, and a numerical technique to implement the valuation formulas is presented.
In an adverse selection model of a securities market with one informed trader and several liquidity traders, we study the implications of the assumption that the informed trader has more information on Monday than on other days. We examine the interday variations in volume, variance, and adverse selection costs, and find that on monday the trading costs and the variance of price changes are highest, and the volume is lower than on Tuesday. These effects are stronger for firms with better public reporting and for firms with more discretionary liquidity trading.
Tests of financial asset pricing models may yield misleading inferences when properties of the data are used to construct the test statistics. In particular, such tests are often based on returns to portfolios of common stock, where portfolios are constructed by sorting on some empirically motivated characteristic of the securities such as market value of equity. Analytical calculations, Monte Carlo simulations, and two empirical examples show that the effects of this type of data snooping can be substantial.
This article investigates why, in October 1987, almost all stock markets fell together despite widely differing economic circumstances. We construct a model in which “contagion” between markets occurs as a result of attempts by rational agents to infer information from price changes in other markets. This provides a channel through which a “mistake” in one market can be transmitted to other markets. We offer supporting evidence for contagion effects using two different sources of data.
If returns on some stocks systematically lead or lag those of others, a portfolio strategy that sells “winners” and buys “losers” can produce positive expected returns, even if no stock’s returns are negatively autocorrelated as virtually all models of overreaction imply. Using a particular contrarian strategy we show that, despite negative autocorrelation in individual stock returns, weekly portfolio returns are strongly positively autocorrelated and are the result of important cross-autocorrelations. We find that the returns of large stocks lead those of smaller stocks, and we present evidence against overreaction as the only source of contrarian profits.
This article shows that the one-state-variable interest-rate models of Vasicek (1977) and Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985b) can be extended so that they are consistent with both the current term structure of interest rates and either the current volatilities of all spot interest rates or the current volatilities of all forward interest rates. The extended Vasicek model is shown to be very tractable analytically. The article compares option prices obtained using the extended Vasicek model with those obtained using a number of other models.
[When the price process for a long-lived asset is of a mixed jump-diffusion type, pricing of options on that asset by arbitrage is not possible if trading is allowed only in the underlying asset and a riskless bond. Using a general equilibrium framework, we derive and analyze option prices when the underlying asset is the market portfolio with discontinuous returns. The premium for the risk of jumps and the diffusion risk forms a significant part of the prices of the options. In this economy, an attempted replication of call and put options by the Black-Scholes type of trading strategies may require substantial infusion of funds when jumps occur. We study the cost and risk implications of such dynamic hedging plans.]