Option pricing formulas obtained from continuous-time no- arbitrage arguments such as the Black-Scholes formula generally do not depend on the drift term of the underlying asset's diffusion equation. However, the drift is essential for properly implementing such formulas empirically, since the...

Implicit in the prices of traded financial assets are Arrow- Debreu state prices or, in the continuous-state case, the state-price density (SPD). We construct an estimator for the SPD implicit in option prices and derive an asymptotic sampling theory for this estimator to gauge its accuracy. The...

Robert C. Merton is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John and Natty McArthur University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997 for a new...