This thesis examines the pricing of volatility on organized U.S. options exchanges from October 31, 2005 through November 1, 2007. The research is motivated in part by the rapid growth of hedge funds that trade volatility and in part by the growing importance that the financial markets place on...

This dissertation consists of four essays on pricing fixed income derivatives and risk management. The first essay presents pricing and duration formulas for floating rate bonds and interest rate swaps with embedded options. It combines Briys et al.'s approximation with the extended Vasicek term...

The emergence of the international debt crisis in the 1980s is typically explained through exogenous shocks to the global economic system, first generating excess liquidity and then creating conditions which render previously attractive lending operations unprofitable. Thus, the international...

A growing body of evidence has accumulated on the behavior of volatility for pricing data on a variety of different financial assets. Twenty-four-hour currency markets are a particularly useful vehicle for examining the relationship between information and asset volatility--in part because the...

This dissertation (consisting of two essays) analyzes the impact of policy measures used to control the risk-taking behavior of banks. Specifically, the first essay explores the impact of increasing the required minimum capital to asset ratios on the riskiness of banks' assets. The second essay...

Mexico liberalized its banking system in 1989 and 1990 and privatized it from mid-1991 to mid-1992. This study first sets those institutional changes in the context of past Mexican financial development, examining the role of the financial sector in achieving macro balance and demonstrating the...

This dissertation develops efficient lattice procedures for pricing American options under stochastic volatility models, and stochastic volatility models extended with jumps in asset returns. It also develops the framework for building lattices for stochastic volatility models extended with...

On September 22, 2004, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Supervision (OFHEO) made public a report that was highly critical of accounting methods at Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise that plays a leading role in the secondary mortgage market. OFHEO charged Fannie Mae with not...