International financial markets are said to be excessively volatile due to destabilizing speculation and excessive market volume. Transactions taxes might help. From studying the literature we conclude that there must be an optimal market liquidity, which minimizes excess volatility. There are...

A market is described by two correlated asset prices. But only one of them is traded while the contingent claim is a function of both assets. We solve the mean-variance hedging prob- lem completely and prove that the optimal strategy consists of a modified pure hedge expressible in terms of the...

This paper investigates the use of price intensities to estimate volatilities based on high-frequency data. We interpret the conditional probability for the occurence of a price event within a certain time horizon as a risk measure which allows us to obtain an estimator of the conditional...

Asset price processes are completely described by information processes and investor´s preferences. In this paper we derive the relationship between the process of investor´s expectations ofthe terminal stock price and asset prices in a general continuous time pricing kernel framework. To...

Pricing of cap insurance contracts is considered for political mortgage rates. A simple stochastic process for mortgage rates is proposed. The process is based on renewal processes for modelling the length of periods with downward and upward trend respectively. Prices are calculated by...

This paper puts focus on the hazard function of inter-trade durations to characterize the intraday trading process. It sheds light on the time varying trade intensity and, thus, on the liquidity of an asset and the informations channels which propagate price signals among asymmetrically informed...

This paper provides an empirical description of the relationshipbetween the trading system operated by a stockexchange and the transaction costs faced by heterogeneous investors who use the exchange. Therecent introduction ofSETS in the London Stock Exchange provides an excellent opportunity...

In this paper we present an exact maximum likelihood treatment forthe estimation of a Stochastic Volatility in Mean(SVM) model based on Monte Carlo simulation methods. The SVM modelincorporates the unobserved volatility as anexplanatory variable in the mean equation. The same extension...

In this paper we test for (Generalized) AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity [(G)ARCH] in daily data on 22 exchange rates and 13 stock market indices using the standard Lagrange Multiplier [LM] test for GARCH and a LM test that is resistant to patches of additive outliers. The data span...