The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market - rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities - led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

Hedge funds are often cited as attractive investments because of their diversification benefits and distinctive risk profiles - in contrast to traditional investments such as stocks and bonds, hedge-fund returns have more complex risk exposures that yield complementary sources of risk premia....

This is an introduction to a five-volume collection of papers on financial econometrics to be published by Edward Elgar Publishers in 2007. Financial econometrics is one of the fastest growing branches of economics today, both in academia and in industry. The increasing sophistication of...

The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

Technical analysis, also known as quot;charting,quot; has been a part of financial practice for many decades, but this discipline has not received the same level of academic scrutiny and acceptance as more traditional approaches such as fundamental analysis. One of the main obstacles is the...

The predictability of an asset's returns will affect option prices on that asset, even though predictability is typically induced by the drift which does not enter the option pricing formula. For discretely sampled data, predictability is linked to the parameters that do enter the option pricing...

Continuous-time stochastic processes have become central to many disciplines, yet the fact that they are approximations to physically realizable phenomena is often overlooked. We quantify one aspect of the approximation errors of continuous-time models by investigating the replication errors...

The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

Robert C. Merton is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John and Natty McArthur University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997 for a new...

Typical value-at-risk (VAR) calculations involve the probabilities of extreme dollar losses, based on the statistical distributions of market prices. Such quantities do not account for the fact that the same dollar loss can have two very different economic valuations, depending on business...