Essays in financial economics : terror, consumption, and investment, currency options and liquidity premium, and purchasing power parity
This thesis is composed of three chapters, each includes one paper. The first chapter includes a paper that analyses the impact of terror on consumption and investment. This paper provides evidence on how consumers and investors react to terror attacks based on a new database from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An increase in terror casualties triggers households to alter their perceived personal security and expected future income. Only ex-post do households distinguish a temporary from a permanent increase in terror casualties. A temporary increase in the number of terror casualties causes a bust-boom cycle of durables consumption and irreversible investment; nondurables are affected less. A permanent increase in the number of terror casualties causes a one-time drop in consumption. This is in line with the theory on irreversible investment and durables consumption: terror generates temporary uncertainty about personal security and future income, which in turn causes a bust-boom cycle of durables due to bunching of purchases in later periods. A permanent increase in terror causes neither bunching nor boom. Similar results are obtained for the effect of terror casualties on fixed capital. The second chapter includes a paper titled: "Arbitrage Tests of Israel's Currency Options Markets." The aims of this study are threefold. First, we test the validity of the Black and Scholes (B-S) model as a naive option-pricing model for the case of an exchange-rate target zone. We find that although we cannot reject the weakly efficient market hypothesis (except for very-near-maturity deep-ITM options), we can reject the strongly efficient market and/or the B-S model validity hypotheses.
Year of publication: |
2004
|
---|---|
Authors: | HajYehia, Samer |
Other Persons: | Whitney Newey and Jerry Hausman. (contributor) |
Institutions: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. (contributor) |
Publisher: |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Saved in:
freely available
Saved in favorites
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