We examine the impact of electricity sector restructuring on the operating efficiency of coal-fired power plants in India. Between 1995 and 2009, 85 percent of coal-based generation capacity owned by state governments was unbundled from vertically integrated State Electricity Boards into state...

Investors in option markets price in a substantial collective government bailout guarantee in the financial sector, which puts a floor on the equity value of the financial sector as a whole, but not on the value of the individual firms. The guarantee makes put options on the financial sector...

Contrary to the Black-Scholes model, volatilities implied by index option prices depend on the exercise price of the option and are often higher than realized volatilities. We explain both facts in the context of a model that can also explain the mean and volatility of equity returns. Our model...

A new options-pricing formula applies to far-out-of-the money put options on the overall stock market when disaster risk is the dominant force, the size distribution of disasters follows a power law, and the economy has a representative agent with Epstein-Zin utility. In the applicable region,...

Municipal bonds are often "advance refunded." Bonds that are not yet callable are defeased by creating a trust that pays the interest up to the call date, and pays the call price. New debt, generally at lower interest rates, is issued to fund the trust. Issuing new securities generally has zero...

In the setting of affineamp;apos; jump-diffusion state processes, this paper provides an analytical treatment of a class of transforms, including various Laplace and Fourier transforms as special cases, that allow an analytical treatment of a range of valuation and econometric problems. Example...

We model the arrival of heterogeneous information in a financial market as a doubly-stochastic Poisson process (DSPP). A DSPP is a member of the family of Poisson processes in which the mean value of the process itself is governed by a stochastic mechanism. We explore the implications for...

Mathematical models of bond pricing are used by both academics and Wall Street practitioners, with practitioners introducing time-dependent parameters to fit arbitrage-free models to selected asset prices. We show, in a simple one-factor setting, that the ability of such models to reproduce a...

We conduct a comprehensive analysis of unspanned stochastic volatility in commodity markets in general and the crude-oil market in particular. We present model-free results that strongly suggest the presence of unspanned stochastic volatility in the crude-oil market. We then develop a tractable...

We use a novel pricing model to filter times series of diffusive volatility and jump intensity from Samp;P 500 index options. These two measures capture the ex-ante risk assessed by investors. We find that both components of risk vary substantially over time, are quite persistent, and correlate...