Proposals to introduce derivatives whose payouts are explicitly linked to the volatility of an underlying asset have been around for some time. In response to these proposals, a few papers have tried to develop valuation formulae for volatility derivatives—derivatives that essentially help...

Individual loans contain a bundle of risks including credit risk and interest rate risk. This paper focuses on the general issue of banks’ management of these various risks in a model with costly loan monitoring and convex taxes. The results suggest that if the hedge is not subject to basis...

In this paper the author formulates and tests an international intertemporal capital asset pricing model in the presence of deviations from purchasing power parity (II-CAPM [PPP]). He finds evidence in favor of at least mild segmentation of international equity markets in which only global...

An empirical examination of the pricing and hedging performance of a stochastic volatility (SV) model with closed form solution (Heston 1993) is provided for options on the S&P 500 index in which the unobservable time varying volatility is jointly estimated with the time invariant parameters of...

Weather derivatives are contingent claims with payo based on a pre-speci ed weather index. Firms exposed to weather risk can transfer it to nancial markets via weather derivatives. We develop a utility-based model for pricing baskets of weather derivatives in over-the-counter markets under...

This paper develops a model in which information losses may be an important part of the cost of an OTC derivatives dealer's failure. A dealer failure forces solvent counterparties of a failed dealer to seek replacement hedges with other dealers. However, by forcing good firms into the...

This paper develops a discrete-time two-factor model of interest rates with analytical solutions for bonds and many interest rate derivatives when the volatility of the short rate follows a GARCH process that can be correlated with the level of the short rate itself. Besides bond and bond...

In this paper we investigate the extent to which insurance companies utilize financial derivatives contracts in the management of risks. The data set we employ allows us to observe the universe of individual insurer transactions for a class of contracts, namely, those normally through of as...

Previous studies on interest rate derivatives have been limited by the relatively short history of most traded derivative securities. The prices for callable U.S. Treasury securities, available for the period 1926–95, provide the sole source of evidence concerning the implied volatility of...