We analyse the effect of differing uncertainty assumptions on the costs of shareholder-bondholder conflicts arising from partially debt-financed investments. A partial equilibrium model, valid for a large class of diffusion processes, is developed and then applied to the specific cases of a...

This paper investigates the effect of operating leverage, and the subsequent abandonment option available to managers, on the relationship between corporate earnings and optimal financial leverage, thereby providing an alternative (rational) explanation for the observed negative relationship...

This paper considers a new class of Monte Carlo methods that are combined with PDE expansions for the pricing and hedging of derivative securities for multidimensional diffusion models. The proposed method combines the advantages of both PDE and Monte Carlo methods and can be directly applied to...

This paper motivates and introduces a two-stage method for estimating diffusion processes based on discretely sampled observations. In the first stage we make use of the feasible central limit theory for realized volatility, as recently developed in Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2002), to...

The paper discusses the problem of hedging not perfectly replicable contingent claims by using a benchmark, the numerraire portfolio, as reference unit. The proposed concept of benchmarked risk minimization generalizes classical risk minimization, pioneered by Follmer, Sondermann and Schweizer....

This paper proposes a paradigm shift in the valuation of long term cash-linked annuities and equity-linked annuities with cash-linked guarantees, away from classical no-arbitrage pricing towards pricing under the real world probability measure. In contrast to risk neutral pricing, which is a...

By employing a continuous time stochastic volatility model, we analyse the dynamic relation between price returns and volatility changes in the commodity futures markets. We use an extensive daily database of gold and crude oil futures and futures options to estimate the model that is well...

According to the expectations hypothesis, the forward rate is equal to the expected future short rate, an argument that is not supported by most empirical studies that demonstrate the existence of term premiums. An alternative arbitrage-free term structure model for reviewing the expectations...

This article provides a generalized two-firm model of default correlation, based on the structural approach that incorporates interest rate risk. In most structural models default is driven by the firms' asset dynamics. In this article, a two-firm model of default is instead driven by the...

This paper builds upon the authors' previous work on transformation of the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) model of the term structure of interest rates to state space form for a fairly general class of volatility specification including stochastic variables. Estimation of this volatility function is...