The accuracy of the solution of dynamic general equilibrium models has become a major issue. Recent papers, substituting second order for first order approximations, have shown to obtain significant differences in accuracy. Second order approximations have had some considerable success in...

We study the mechanism of inequality due to educational lock-in effects. Recent research on inequality such as Brock and Durlauf (2000a, b) and Durlauf (1999a, b, 2000) has emphasized the fact that the composition and behavior of groups to which a person belongs play an important role for...

Following the lead of Merton (1974), recent research has focused on the relationship of credit risk to firm value. Although this has usually been done for a single firm, the growth of structured finance, which necessarily involves the correlation between included securities, has spurred interest...

Here I consider the dynamics of interest rate processes in the multi-factor model specified in Heath, Jarrow and Morton (1992). Despite its flexibility and theoretical advances, the number of empirical studies using the HJM model remains inadequate, principally because of the difficulty...

This paper examines two numerical methods for pricing of American spread options in the case where both underlying assets follow the jump-diffusion process of Merton (1976). We extend the integral equation representation for the American spread option presented by Broadie and Detemple (1997) to...

This paper considers the problem of pricing American options when the dynamics of the underlying are driven both by stochastic volatility following a square root process as used by Heston (1993) and by a Poisson jump process as introduced by Merton (1976). The two-factor homogeneous...

The aim of this paper is to show, within the mean-variance framework, how the market belief can be constructed as the result of the aggregation of heterogeneous beliefs and how the market equilibrium prices of risky assets can thus be determined. The heterogeneous beliefs are defined in terms of...

We reconsider the derivation of the traditional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) in the discrete time setting for a portfolio of one riskless asset and many risky assets. In contrast to the standard setting, it is assumed that agents are heterogeneous in their conditional means and covariances...