In the early 70s Merton developed a theory based on economic arguments to study the properties of option and warrant prices. The main tool in his proofs was the portfolio dominance principle. In the context where the price of a contingent claim satisfies a partial differential equation we...

We give a new way to price American options, using Samuelson´s formula. We first obtain the option price corresponding to a European option at time t, weighting it by the probability that the underlying asset takes the value S at time t. This factor is given by the solution of the Fokker-Planck...

The purpose of this paper is to show that an affine model which incorporates the condition of no arbitrage enables improvements in forecasting the term structure of interest rates in Mexico. The three factors of the yield curve (level, slope and curvature) used in the model are estimated by the...

In a typical developing country, coverage of the contributory social security system is low. We analyze the aggregate effects of a revenue-neutral fiscal-cum-social policy reform that consists of: 1) the implementation of universal social insurance to replace the system with low coverage; and 2)...

Current data provide macroeconomic information for a large number of countries and for a long period of time (macro panels). This causes that in these panels slope heterogeneity and cross-section dependence (CSD) are a rule rather than the exception, leading to fixed effects slope estimators to...

This paper analyzes the effect of information overload on preference or aversion for variety. According to the model, a rational decision maker who suffers from information overload, faces a two-stage decision process, and is choosing from a set of unknown goods will find it optimal at some...

We construct an index theorem for smooth infinite economies that shows that generically the number of equilibria is odd. As a corollary, this gives a new proof of existence and gives conditions that guarantee global uniqueness of equilibria.

Financial advisors typically recommend that a long-term investor should hold a higher percentage of his wealth in stocks than a short-term investor. However, part of the academic literature disagrees with this advice. We use a spatial dominance test which is suited for comparing alternative...

We present a model of imperfect price competition where not all firms can sell to all consumers. A network structure models the local interaction of firms and consumers. We find that aggregate surplus is maximized with a fully connected network, which corresponds to perfect competition, and...

We consider a decision maker who enjoys choosing from a varied set of alternatives. Building on behavioral evidence, we propose testable axioms which characterize preference for variety, and provide a representation theorem. We go on to illustrate the potential effects of preference for variety...