In this paper, we relate security returns in the thirty securities in the Dow Jones index to regime shifts in the market portfolio (S&P500) volatility. We model market volatility as a multiple-state Markov switching process of order one and estimate non-diversifiable security risk (beta) in the...

Several studies incorporating estimated volatilities into option pricing formulas have appeared in the literature. However, the models described in these studies tend to perform quite poorly in out-of-sample tests. In particular, significant departures from the observed prices can be seen for...

We consider the behavior of the price of a continuously stored commodity, for which discounted price is a non-constant martingale, and thus not-predictable. We prove that the discounted price realization is within any given neighborhood of zero, with any given probability less than 1, beyond a...

This article analyzes the specifications of option pricing models based on time-changed Levy processes. We classify option pricing models based on (i) the structure of the jump component in the underlying return process, (ii) the source of stochastic volatility, and (iii) the specification of...

The aim of this work is to study the pricing problem for derivatives depending on two stocks driven by a bidimensional Lévy process. The main idea is to apply Girsanov's Theorem for Lévy processes, in order to reduce the posed problem to the pricing of a one Lévy driven stock in an auxiliary...

Most investors purchase securities knowing they will resell those securities in the future. Uncertainty about the preferences of future trading counter-parties causes randomness in future resale prices that we call liquidity risk. It is natural to suppose that investors are asymmetrically...

``Limits of Arbitrage" theories require that the marginal investor in a particular asset market be a specialized arbitrageur. Then the constraints faced by this arbitrageur (i.e. capital constraints) feed through into asset prices. We examine the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market in this...

We study how heterogeneous beliefs affect returns and examine whether heterogeneous beliefs are a priced factor in traditional asset pricing models. To accomplish this task, we suggest new empirical measures based on the disagreement among analysts about expected (short-term and long-term)...

This paper examines the long-run dynamics and the cyclical structure of the US stock market using fractional integration techniques. We implement a version of the tests of Robinson (1994a), which enables one to consider unit (or fractional) roots both at the zero (long-run) and at the cyclical...

Promising emerging equity markets often witness investment herds and frenzies, accompanied by an abundance of media coverage. Complementarity in information acquisition can explain these anomalies. Because information has a high fixed cost of production, its equilibrium price is low when...