This paper explores the implications of investors’ everyday mild feelings for aggregate asset returns. To this end, it introduces a novel class of state dependent preferences - happiness maintenance preferences - into the standard Mehra and Prescott (1985) economy by allowing investors’...

This paper describes an attempt to measure resources used to produce Individual Development Accounts in a program run by the Community Action Project of Tulsa County. The experimental design of the program-- participants were selected from applicants at random--aims to inform the overall...

The UK experienced a major residential real estate boom-bust cycle from the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties, accompanied by unprecedented shifts in the owner occupancy rate of young households. Previous empirical analyses have pointed toward income changes and financial deregulation as the...

In the context of arbitrage-free modelling of financial derivatives, we introduce a novel calibration technique for models in the affine- quadratic class for the purpose of contingent claims pricing and risk- management. In particular, we aim at calibrating a stochastic volatility jump diffusion...

This paper uses factor analytic techniques for deriving factor realizations from a group of main economic indicators of both the German and the Turkish economy in order to test the effect of economic factors on asset returns in an APT framework. The factor structure of the German economy yields...

This paper investigates the time-varying behavior of systematic risk for eighteen pan-European industry portfolios. Using weekly data over the period 1987-2005, three different modeling techniques in addition to the standard constant coefficient model are employed: a bivariate t- GARCH(1,1)...

In this paper we revisit the issue of integration of emerging stock markets with each other and with the developed markets over different time horizons using weekly stock indices data from June 1997 until March 2005 of the five major MENA equity markets (Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco and...

This paper tests empirically the performance of three structural models of corporate bond pricing, namely Merton (1974), Leland (1994) and Fan and Sundaresan (2000). While the first two models overestimate bond prices, the Fan and Sundaresan model reveals an extremely good performance. When...

An economy in which deposit-taking banks of a Diamond/Dybvig style and an asset market coexist is modelled. Firstly, within this framework we characterize distinct financial systems depending on the fraction of households with direct investment opportunities that are less efficient than those...

Este documento de trabajo analiza el Modelo de Valoración de Opciones basado en la Estructura de Tasas de Interés de Salomon Brothers. Con ello se calcula la duración efectiva de bonos prepagables.