Forecasting based pricing of Weather Derivatives (WDs) is a new approach in valuation of contingent claims on nontradable underlyings. Standard techniques are based on historical weather data. Forward-looking information such as meteorological forecasts or the implied market price of risk (MPR)...

Much attention has been paid to the large decreases in value of non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) during the financial crisis. Many observers have argued that the fall in prices was partly driven by decreased liquidity and fire sales. We investigate whether capital...

A State Price Density (SPD) is the density function of a risk neutral equivalent martingale measure for option pricing, and is indispensible for exotic option pricing and portfolio risk management. Many approaches have been proposed in the last two decades to calibrate a SPD using financial...

Many observers have argued that the fall in RMBS prices during the crisis was partly caused by fire sales. We provide an explanation for why financial institutions may have engaged in fire sales using a unique dataset of RMBS transactions for insurance companies. We show that risk-sensitive...

On the temperature derivative market, modeling temperature volatility is an important issue for pricing and hedging. In order to apply pricing tools of financial mathematics, one needs to isolate a Gaussian risk factor. A conventional model for temperature dynamics is a stochastic model with...

Much attention has been paid to the large decreases in value of non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) during the financial crisis. Many observers have argued that the fall in prices was partly caused by fire sales. We use capital requirements and accounting rules to identify...

The analysis of diffusion processes in financial models is crucially dependent on the form of the drift and diffusion coefficient functions. A methodology is proposed for estimating and testing coefficient functions for ergodic diffusions that are not directly observable. It is based on...

Weather derivatives (WD) are different from most financial derivatives because the underlying weather cannot be traded and therefore cannot be replicated by other financial instruments. The market price of risk (MPR) is an important parameter of the associated equivalent martingale measures used...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

High Tobin's q industries receive more funding from capital markets than low Tobin's q industries from 1971 to 1996. Since then, the opposite is true. The key to understanding this shift is that large firms for which q is more a proxy for rents than for investment opportunities have become more...