Inflation rates are highly persistent and extremely difficult to predict. Most statistical predictions based on predictive regressions fail to outperform the simple assumption of random walk in out-of-sample testing. The poor out-of-sample performance is a common feature of predictive...

With increasing appreciation of the fact that stock return variance is stochastic and variance risk is heavily priced, the industry has created a series of variance derivative products to span variance risk. The variance swap contract is the most actively traded of these products. It pays at...

The challenge of international term structure models is to simultaneously account for the properties of interest rate term structures and foreign exchange rates within an arbitrage-free framework. We extend the quadratic term structure models proposed in Leippold and Wu (2002) to multiple...

Most existing hedging theories are derived under strong, idealistic assumptions on both the underlying security price dynamics and the trading environments. Practical concerns such as contract availability, transaction cost, and uncertainty regarding the security price dynamics impose severe...

Economic theory suggests that the magnitude and direction of a company's currency risk exposure depends crucially on its fundamental involvement in international trade. For U.S. industries, we find that the stock performance of import-oriented companies moves positively with the performance of...

Most existing hedging approaches are based on neutralizing risk exposures defined under a pre-specified model. This paper proposes a new, simple, and robust hedging approach based on the affinity of the derivative contracts. As a result, the strategy does not depend on assumptions on the...

We test a theory that provides a simple and robust linkage between the market prices of credit default swaps (CDS) and far out-of-the-money equity American put options on the same reference company. The linkage is established under a general class of stock price dynamics. We assume that the...

Prices of currency options commonly differ from the Black-Scholes formula along two dimensions: implied volatilities vary by strike price (volatility smiles) and maturity (implied volatility of at-the-money options increases, on average, with maturity). We account for both using Gram-Charlier...

The Federal Reserve adjusts the target federal funds rate discretely, causing discontinuity in short-term interest rates. However, unlike random Poisson jumps, these adjustments are well anticipated by the market. Within the affine term structure framework, we incorporate an anticipated jump...

With increasing appreciation of the fact that stock return variance is stochastic and variance risk is heavily priced, the industry has created a series of variance derivative products to span variance risk. The variance swap contract is the most actively traded of these products. It pays at...