We explore the pricing of variance risk by decomposing stocks' total variance into systematicand idiosyncratic return variances. While systematic variance risk exhibits a negative priceof risk, common shocks to the variances of idiosyncratic returns carry a large positive riskpremium. This...

We identify local and global factors across international bond markets that arepoorly spanned by the traditional level, slope and curvature factors but havestrong forecasting power for future bond excess returns. Local and global fac-tors are jointly signicant predictors of bond returns, where...

In this paper, we consider an incomplete market framework and explain how to use jointly observed prices of the underlying asset and of some derivatives written on this assetfor an efficient pricing of other derivatives. This question involves two types of moment restrictions, which can be...

Demand is growing for a better understanding of how assets are priced in countries outside of the U.S.While financial data are available for many firms world-wide, it is important to have a reliable andreplicable method of constructing high-quality systematic risk factors from these data. This...

A common method of valuing the equity in leveraged transactions is the flows-to-equity method whereby the free cash flow available to equity holders is discounted at the cost of equity. This method uses a standard definition of equity free cash flow, but the cost of equity varies over time as...

We introduce and study no-good-deal valuation bounds defined in terms of expected utility. A utility-based good deal is a payoff whose expected utility is toohigh in comparison to the utility of its price. Forbidding good deals induces, viaduality, restrictions on pricing kernels and thereby...

We introduce a new analytical approach to price American options. Using an explicit and intuitive proxy for the exercise rule, we derive tractable pricing formulas using a short-maturity asymptotic expansion. Depending on model parameters, this method can accurately price options with...

The goal of this paper is to assess, for the first time, the empirical impact of "Kaynes' beauty contest", or "higher order belief", on asset price volatility. The paper shows that heterogeneous expectations induce higher order beliefs and that heterogeneous expectation asset pricing models...

This paper analyzes the effects that uncertainty about economic fundamentalshas on aggregate trading volume. First, the trading volume of an investor facinga standard consumption portfolio choice problem is derived. It is found that if theparameters describing the investment opportunity set...