Using more than two years of daily interest rate cap price data, this paper provides a systematic documentation of a volatility smile in cap prices. We find that Black (1976) implied volatilities exhibit an asymmetric smile (sometimes called a sneer) with a stronger skew for in-the-money caps...

While home ownershipt provides a great deal of personal and social benefits, it poses a substantial constraint on individuals' asset allocation.

Decision theorists claim that an ordinal measure of risk may be sufficient for an agent to make a rational choice under uncertainty. We propose a measure of financial risk, namely the Varying Cross-sectional Risk (VCR), that is based on a ranking of returns. VCR is defined as the probability of...

Using a generalized cross-spectral approach, we propose a model-free omnibus statistical procedure to check whether the direction of changes in an economic variable is predictable using the history of its past changes. A class of separate inference procedures are also given to gauge possible...

Conventional time series analysis, focusing exclusively on a time series at a given scale, lacks the ability to explain the nature of the data generating process. A process equation that successfully explains daily price changes, for example, is unable to characterize the nature of hourly price...

This paper studies the limit distributions of Monte Carlo estimators of diffusion processes. Two types of estimators are examined. The first one is based on the Euler scheme applied to the original processes; the second applies the Euler scheme to a variance-stabilizing transformation of the...

While home ownership provides a great deal of personal and social benefits, it poses a substantial constraint on individuals' asset allocation.