In an environment with stocks and short-term debt, random changes in the risk-reward frontier produce hedging demands for equities, implying that portfolio policies supporting optimal life-cycle consumption are rarely mean-variance efficient. Pursuing optimal life-cycle portfolio policies is...

Modern portfolio theory produces optimal portfolios from estimates of expected returns and a covariance matrix. Such optimal portfolios are efficient portfolios, that is they provide the maximum level of expected return for a given level of risk. We present a method for portfolio selection based...

A new relationship is derived for net present value (NPV) per dollar invested that is composed entirely of interest rates. The rates are mark-ups to the cost of capital, each mark-up being an internal rate of return (IRR) embedded in the complex plane. The result has been shown before, but only...

Options pricing is developed in the context of Markov semigroups and the associated infinitesimal generators of diffusion processes. The transition probability function determines an operator with an associated generator defining the mean infinitesimal rate of change in the solution function....

A new methodology for calibrating parameters when working with intractable, dynamic structural models is developed. A straight-forward extension also allows for formal estimation and hypothesis testing in a Generalized Method of Moment framework. The method is based on multigrid techniques used...

Many owners of growing privately-held firms make operational and financial decisions in an effort to maximize the expected present value of the proceeds from an Initial Public Offering (IPO). We ask: What is the right time to make an IPO and How should operational and financial decisions be...

Modelling price formation in electricity markets is a notoriously difficult process, due to physical constraints on electricity generation and transmission, and the potential for market power. This difficulty has inspired the recent development of bottom-up agent-based algorithmic learning...

In this research, a first order Markov model is built from a corpus of bagana music, a traditional lyre from Ethiopia. Different ways in which low order Markov models can be used to build quality assessment metrics for an optimization algorithm are explained. These are then implemented in a...

We provide a monotonic transformation of an initial diffusion with a level-dependent diffusion parameter that yields a second, deterministic parameter process. Altering the diffusion parameter while maintaining the original Brownian motion at the expense of the drift can be viewed as a...