We study European options on the ratio of the stock price to its average and viceversa. Some of these options are traded in the Australian Stock Exchange since 1992, thus we call them Australian Asian options. For geometric averages, we obtain closed-form expressions for option prices. For...

This paper analyses the robustness of Least-Squares Monte Carlo, a technique recently proposed by Longstaff and Schwartz (2001) for pricing American options. This method is based on least-squares regressions in which the explanatory variables are certain polynomial functions. We analyze the...

We experimentally question the assertion of Prospect Theory that people display risk attraction in choices involving high-probability losses. Indeed, our experimental participants tend to avoid fair risks for large (up to € 90), high-probability (80%) losses. Our research hinges on a novel...

This paper explores biases in the elicitation of utilities under risk and the contribution that generalizations of expected utility can make to the resolution of these biases. We used five methods to measure utilities under risk and found clear violations of expected utility. Of the theories...

We study the effects that the Maastricht treaty, the creation of the ECB, and the Euro changeover had on the dynamics of European business cycles using a panel VAR and data from ten European countries - seven from the Euro area and three outside of it. There are changes in the features of...

This paper studies the rate of convergence of an appropriate discretization scheme of the solution of the Mc Kean-Vlasov equation introduced by Bossy and Talay. More specifically, we consider approximations of the distribution and of the density of the solution of the stochastic differential...

We compare a set of empirical Bayes and composite estimators of the population means of the districts (small areas) of a country, and show that the natural modelling strategy of searching for a well fitting empirical Bayes model and using it for estimation of the area-level means can be inefficient.

Any electoral system has an electoral formula that converts vote proportions into parliamentary seats. Pre-electoral polls usually focus on estimating vote proportions and then applying the electoral formula to give a forecast of the parliament's composition. We here describe the problems...

Standard methods for the analysis of linear latent variable models often rely on the assumption that the vector of observed variables is normally distributed. This normality assumption (NA) plays a crucial role in assessing optimality of estimates, in computing standard errors, and in designing...

In this paper I explore the issue of nonlinearity (both in the data generation process and in the functional form that establishes the relationship between the parameters and the data) regarding the poor performance of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) in small samples. To this purpose I...