Using more than two years of daily interest rate cap price data, this paper provides a systematic documentation of a volatility smile in cap prices. We find that Black (1976) implied volatilities exhibit an asymmetric smile (sometimes called a sneer) with a stronger skew for in-the-money caps...

A large number of microeconomic decision variables such as investments, prices, inventories or employment are characterized by intermittent large adjustments. The behavior of those variables has been often modeled as following state-dependent rules. The optimality of such state-dependent rules...

This paper proposes the view that financial development and economic growth are linked through the characteristics of technology. The most obvious connection between technology and financial innovation emerges through risk-sharing. Technology is modeled as a distribution over outcomes....

This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the socialwelfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...

We study legal restrictions on private contracting in the form of limitations on the severity of non-monetary punishments. We locate the rationale for such restrictions in externalities that parties impose on future relationships: punishments that lower an agent's future productivity may lower...

Decision theorists claim that an ordinal measure of risk may be sufficient for an agent to make a rational choice under uncertainty. We propose a measure of financial risk, namely the Varying Cross-sectional Risk (VCR), that is based on a ranking of returns. VCR is defined as the probability of...

This paper considers the parametric inference of a wide range of structural econometric models. The class of models considered includes those with parameter-dependent support and those derived from game-theoretic models. Inference of those models has raised some important econometric issues....

This paper considers tests of misspecification in a heteroscedastic transformation model. We derive Lagrange multiplier (LM) statistics for (i) testing functional form and heteroscedasticity jointly, (ii) testing functional form in the presence of heteroscedasticity, and (iii) testing...

Bootstrap aggregating or Bagging, introduced by Breiman (1996a), has been proved to be effective to improve on unstable forecast. Theoretical and empirical works using classification, regression trees, variable selection in linear and non-linear regression have shown that bagging can generate...

The paper examines the processes underlying economic fluctuations by investigating the volatility moderation of U.S. economy in the early 1980's. We decompose the volatility decline using a dynamic factor framework into a common stochastic trend, common transitory component and idiosyncratic...