In this paper we show the advantages of staged investments for venture capitalists. We develop an option-pricing model that enables to evaluate the flexibility acquired by a venture capitalist when he stages his investment process. Instead of investing a fixed amount at the beginning of the...

We develop a general equilibrium model of a production economy which has a risky production technology as well as a growth option to expand the scale of the productive sector of the economy. We show that when confronted with growth options, the representative consumer may sharply alter...

If debt capacity is defined as the incremental debt that is optimally associated with an additional asset, then the debt capacity of growth options is negative. Underinvestment costs of debt increase and free cash flow benefits of debt fall with additional growth options. Thus, if firm value...

We investigate the influence of various fundamental variables on a cross-section of credit default swap transaction data. Credit default swap rates can be seen as a superior proxy to credit risk than bond spreads are. Because we have transaction prices rather than quotes, we have thus...

Morck, Yeung and Yu (MYY, 2000) show that R2 and other measures of stock market synchronicity are higher in countries with less developed financial systems and poorer corporate governance. MYY and Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel and Xu (2001) also find a secular decline in R2 in the United States over...

Agent based models take into account limited rational behaviour of individuals acting on financial markets. Explicit simulation of this behaviour and the resulting interac-tion of individuals provide a description of aggregate financial market time series. Al-though the outcomes of such...

We aim at accommodating the existing affine jump-diffusion and quadratic models under the same roof, namely the linear-quadratic jump-diffusion (LQJD) class. We give a complete characterization of the dynamics underlying this class of models as well as identification constraints, and compute...

This article proposes an estimation procedure for the affine stochastic volatility models with jumps both in the asset price and variance processes. The estimation procedure is based on the joint (here bi-variate) unconditional characteristic function for the stochastic process for which we...

To obtain the maximum benefits from diversification, financial theory suggests that investors should invest internationally because of the larger potential for risk reduction stemming from the lower correlation exisiting between assets of different countries. The question that we raise in this...

We introduce Indirect Robust Generalized Method of Moments (IRGMM), a new simulation-based estimation methodology, to model short-term interest rate processes. The primary advantage of IRGMM relative to classical estimators of the continuous-time short-rate diffusion processes is that it...