Credit risk models like Moody’s KMV are now well established in the market and give bond managers reliable estimates of default probabilities for individual firms. Until now it has been hard to relate those probabilities to the actual credit spreads observed on the market for corporate bonds....

Dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) price interest rate derivatives based on the model­ implied fair values of the yield curve, ignoring any pricing residuals on the yield curve that are either from model approximations or market imperfections. In contrast, option pricing in practice often...

In this paper, we survey a wide range of theoretical and empirical papers on derivatives markets to address the information contents of trading activities in derivatives markets. Both theoretical and empirical research on options market and futures market indicate that the presence of...

We propose a direct and robust method for quantifying the variance risk premium on financial assets. We theoretically and numerically show that the risk-neutral expected value of the return variance, also known as the variance swap rate, is well approximated by the value of a particular...

This paper considers a class of Heath-Jarrow-Morton (1992) term structure models, characterized by time deterministic volatilities for the instantaneous forward rate. The bias that arises from using observed futures yields as a proxy for the unobserved instantaneous forward rate is analyzed. The...

Two types of financial instruments including (overnight) compounding are studied in this note. The first one is overnight compounded instruments in the case where the settlement is delayed with respect to the end of the compounding period (floating leg of the OIS). The second is options on the...

This study analyzes the interaction of agency problems in public policy and of agency problems inside the firm: it investigates the case of a large privatized firm subject to many policy constraints. The last steps of Telefonica's privatization were designed to promote a disperse ownership and...

We study the behavior of real exchange rates in a two­country dynamic equilibrium model. In this model, consumers can only consume domestic goods but can invest costlessly in capital stocks of both countries. Nevertheless, transporting goods between the two countries is costly and, hence, the...

This paper deals with the issue of calculating daily Value-at-Risk (VaR) measures within an environment of thin trading. Our approach focuses on fixed income portfolios with low frequency of transactions in which the missing data problem makes VaR measures difficult to calculate. We propose and...

The question of long-run predictability in the aggregate US stock market is still unsettled. This is due to the lack of a robust method to judge the statistical significance of long-run regressions under the maintained hypothesis. By developing a spectral theory of long-run regressions with both...