Accurate business failure prediction models would be extremely valuable to many industry sectors, particularly financial investment and lending. The potential value of such models is emphasised by the extremely costly failure of high-profile companies in the recent past. Consequently, a...

This paper provides an overview of the most important structured finance instruments in the context of the development of the financial turmoil that started in the third quarter of 2007 and continued into 2008. These financial market tensions were triggered by concerns about exposures of...

This paper investigates what predicts changes in corporate governance in emerging markets. To conduct this study we utilize a unique data set from AllianceBernstein that consists of monthly firm-level corporate governance ratings for 24 emerging market countries for almost seven years. Since the...

This is a comprehensive study of the growth and impact of agricultural futures market traders. The growth of financial investment in commodities has introduced participants and raised both new questions and warranted revisiting old questions; these include the impact on commodity prices, the...

No-till (NT) has been shown to reduce fuel, labor, and machinery costs compared to conventional-till (CT) but very few rice producers in Arkansas practice NT. The low adoption rate is most likely due to difficulties in management but also limited information on the profitability and risk of NT....

Replaced with revised version of paper 02/10/10.

In this dissertation, I investigate three related topics on asset pricing: the consumption-based asset pricing under long-run risks and fat tails, the pricing of VIX (CBOE Volatility Index) options and the market price of risk embedded in stock returns and stock options. These three topics are...

The risk premium has risen sharply in the nation's financial markets. This is the message to be drawn from the significant rise in interest rates in recent days -- notwithstanding a stagnant economy, slowing inflation, and credit demands which, overall, are only moderate. The economy is clearly...

This paper develops a reduced form three-factor model which includes a liquidity proxy of market conditions which is then used to provide implicit prices. The model prices are then compared with observed market prices of credit default swaps to determine if swap rates adequately reflect market...