We develop a mathematical proof demonstrating that only financially-strong firms will sell put options on their own stock, but financially-weak firms will not. The sale of options on a company's own stock exposes the buyer to default risk of the issuer, which additionally complicates the payoff...

There is a link between barrier options and tax shields of interest expense. We combine this link with a traditional valuation approach, to present practical valuation formulas for interest tax shields in three debt scenarios with risk of default: (1) constant debt, (2) delayed debt, and (3)...

Based on the works of Brockman and Turtle (2003) and Giesecke (2004), we propose in this study a hybrid barrier option model to explain observed credit spreads. It is free of problems with the structural model which underprescribed credit spreads for investment grade corporate bonds and...

Existing dynamic capital structure models are based on single triggers determining bankruptcy, mainly over-indebtedness or illiquidity. The latter one tends to underestimate optimal capital structures by ignoring capital providers' flexibility to inject fresh money. The former one leans towards...

The value premium is the empirical observation that low market/book “value” stocks have higher returns than high market/book “growth” stocks. In this paper, we investigate and present evidence for an “equity as a call option hypothesis” for the value premium. Volatility decreases the...

Scholars and policymakers now debate reforms that would prevent a bankruptcy filing from being a moment that forces valuation of the firm, crystallization of claims against it, and elimination of junior stakeholders' interest in future appreciation in firm value. These reforms have many names,...

Over-allotment arrangements are nowadays part of almost any initial public offering. The underwriting banks borrow stocks from the previous shareholders to issue more than the initially announced number of shares. This is combined with the option to cover this short position at the issue price....

R&D is often a highly uncertain venture where experiments achieve successful outcomes on an extraordinarily rare basis. Just one successful product could change the future of a company; the discovery stage can often be an invaluable or disastrous experience. We develop a real R&D option model...

In this paper, I have used simple arbitrage argument to derive a dozen of model-free option price properties. In addition to deriving the Greeks under the model-free framework, the results show that first, in contrast to the traditional view, a European call (put) option for a...

Hedging at-the-money digital options near maturity, remains a challenge in quantitative finance. In the present work, we carry out a hedging strategy by means of a bull spread. We study the probability of super- and sub-hedge the digital option and minimize the probability of a sub-hedge...