Markowitz's celebrated mean--variance portfolio optimization theory assumes that the means and covariances of the underlying asset returns are known. In practice, they are unknown and have to be estimated from historical data. Plugging the estimates into the efficient frontier that assumes known...

Family-owned companies occupy a large proportion of enterprises all over the world. It is meaningful for people to understand how family ownership may affect firms’ financing strategies. This paper tends to summarize the results of previous studies. However, different scholars reach different...

In many credit risk and pricing applications, credit transition matrix is modeled by a constant transition probability or generator matrix for Markov processes. Based on empirical evidence, we model rating transition processes as piecewise homogeneous Markov chains with unobserved structural...

This paper considers the problem of European option pricing in the presence of proportional transaction costs when the price of the underlying follows a jump diffusion process. Using an approach that is based on maximization of the expected utility of terminal wealth, we transform the option...

This paper studies inter-trade durations in the NASDAQ limit order market and finds that inter-trade durations in ultra-high frequency have two modes. One mode is to the order of approximately 10^{-4} seconds, and the other is to the order of 10^0 seconds. This phenomenon and other empirical...