This paper contributes in two ways. First it extends the Geske (1979) compound option pricing model to the case where the underlying call is a down-and-out claim. Second it provides an internally consistent frame-work for valuing options on general corporate securities. Numerical results suggest...

This paper examines the effect of using Black and Scholes formula for pricing and hedging options in a discrete time heteroskedastic environment. This is done by a simulation procedure where asset returns are generated from a GARCH (1,1)-t model. In the simulation a hypothetical trader writes an...

In this paper we discuss the significant computational simplification that occurs when option pricing is approached through the change of numeraire technique. The original impetus was a recently published paper (Hoang, Powell, Shi 1999) on endowment options; in the present paper we extend these...

We develop a structural bond pricing approach and implement it on a large panel of US industrial bonds using an efficient maximum likelihood methodology. We evaluate the model's ability to predict yield spread levels and changes out-of-sample. Errors are smaller and distinctly less variable than...

For finite dimensional factor models, the paper studies general quadratic term structures. These term structures include as special cases the affine term structures and the Gaussian quadratic term structures, previously studied in the literature. We show, however, that there are other,...

We suggest a methodology for valuing corporate securities that allows the straightforward derivation of closed form solutions for complex capital structure scenarios. The tractability of the approach stems from its modularity - we provide a number of intuitive building blocks that are sufficient...

This paper is a selective survey of new or recent methods to extract information about market expectations from asset prices for monetary policy purposes. Traditionally, interest rates and forward exchange rates have been used to extract expected means of future interest rates, exchange rates...

One of the main objections to applying contingent claims analysis outside the area of derivatives pricing, such as to the pricing of corporate (or sovereign) debt, has been that it is not possible to trade in the relevant state variable, e.g. the assets of a firm. Consequently, replicating...

In theory, prices of current-month federal funds futures contracts should reflect market expectations of near-term movements in the Federal Reserve's target level for the federal funds rate. However, empirical results show that such measures of market expectations are too noisy to predict...

The purpose of this essay is to give an overview of some recent workconcerning structural properties of the evolution of the forward rate curve in an arbitrage free bond market. The main problems to be discussed are as follows. <p> <p> 1. When is a given forward rate model consistent with a given...</p></p>