This article examines the relationship between crisis, ideas, and economic policy-making in Britain during the 1970s stagflation, looking specifically at the turbulent years 1974-76. It argues that existing ideas-based approaches either fail to define 'idea' with any precision, or explain both...

We introduce a simple model for the pricing of European-style options when the underlying dividend process is given by a geometric Brownian motion with Markov-modulated coefficients. It turns out that the corresponding stock process is characterized by both stochastic coefficients and jumps....

The modeling of credit events is in effect the modeling of the times to default of various names. The distribution of individual times to default can be calibrated from CDS quotes, but for more complicated instruments, such as CDOs, the joint law is needed. Industry practice is to model this...

In the econometrics of financial time series, it is customary to take some parametric model for the data, and then estimate the parameters from historical data. This approach suffers from several problems. Firstly, how is estimation error to be quantified, and then taken into account when making...

In this paper, we develop the idea that firm sizes evolve as log Brownian motions dSt = St(σdWt + μdt) where the constants μ, σ are characteristics of the firm, chosen from some distribution, and that the firms are wound up at some random time. At any given time, we see a firm of a given...

We consider optimal selection problems, where the number N1 of candidates for the job is random, and the times of arrival of the candidates are uniformly distributed in [0, 1]. Such best choice problems are generally harder than the fixed-N counterparts, because there is a learning process going...

In this paper we solve the hedge fund manager's optimization problem in a model that allows for investors to enter and leave the fund over time depending on its performance. The manager's payoff at the end of the year will then depend not just on the terminal value of the fund level, but also on...