This paper investigates the relation between returns on stock indices and their corresponding futures contracts in order to evaluate potential explanations for the pervasive yet anomalous evidence of positive, short-horizon portfolio autocorrelations. Using a simple theoretical framework, we...

This paper is a comparative study of the responses to the 1995 Wharton School survey of derivative usage among US non-financial firms and a 1997 companion survey on German non-financial firms. It is not a mere comparison of the results of both studies, but a comparative study, drawing a...

This paper develops a model for the pricing of credit derivatives using observables. The model (i) is arbitrage-free, (ii) accommodates path-dependence, and (iii) handles a range of securities, even with American features. The computer implementation uses a recursive scheme that is convenient...

This paper will discuss the role of derivative products in international capital flows, especially in providing a means of both reducing and enhancing market risks associated with given net flows. It will emphasize how derivatives can be used to evade risk-control or prudential regulation,...

Futures market clearinghouses are intermediaries that make large volume trading between anonymous parties feasible. During the October 1987 market crash rumors spread that a major clearinghouse might fail. This paper presents estimates of three measures of the default exposure on the popular...

Given a European derivative security with an arbitrary payoff function and a corresponding set of" underlying securities on which the derivative security is based, we solve the dynamic replication problem: find a" self-financing dynamic portfolio strategy involving only the underlying securities...

A great deal of effort and ingenuity has been addressed to patching holes in the income tax attributable to realization accounting. A classic instance of the problem is the headachescreated by capital gains, whereby the taxpayer can choose to postpone recognition of gain and accelerate...

Implicit in the prices of traded financial assets are Arrow- Debreu state prices or, in the continuous-state case, the state-price density (SPD). We construct an estimator for the SPD implicit in option prices and derive an asymptotic sampling theory for this estimator to gauge its accuracy. The...

We propose a nonparametric estimation procedure for continuous- time stochastic models. Because prices of derivative securities depend crucially on the form of the instantaneous volatility of the underlying process, we leave the volatility function unrestricted and estimate it nonparametrically....

In the last ten to fifteen years financial derivative securities have become an important, and controversial, product for commercial banks. The controversy concerns whether the size, complexity, and risks associated with these securities, the difficulties with accurately reporting timely...