Default correlation is a concern especially after witnessing the financial crisis. To find default correlations, we would like to know asset correlations which are unobservable. In this paper we derive a model to infer asset correlations from Credit Default Swaps (CDSs). We use a structural...

This paper uses a novel dataset of Commodity-Linked Notes (CLNs) to examine the impact of the flows of financial investors on commodity futures prices. Investor flows into and out of CLNs are passed to and withdrawn from the futures markets via issuers' trades to hedge their CLN liabilities. The...

The last three decades have witnessed a whole array of option pricing models. We compare the predictive performances of a selection of models by carrying out a horse race on Samp;P 500 index options along the lines of Jackwerth and Rubinstein (2001). The models we consider include:...

Structured equity products (SEP's) are medium-term notes with payoffs based on the prices of common stocks, baskets of stocks, or stock indices. This paper documents striking patterns in the payoff profiles of SEPs. Products based on the prices of individual equities predominantly have concave...

The question of whether and to what extent option trading impacts underlying stock prices has been a focus of intense interest since options began exchange-based trading in 1973. Despite considerable effort, no convincing evidence for a pervasive impact has been produced. A recent strand of...

There are a number of circumstances in finance where it is useful to estimate diffusion processes conditional on some event. In this paper, we develop the theoretical and numerical tools necessary to perform conditional estimation of diffusion processes within a generalized method of moments...

This paper presents striking evidence that option trading changes the prices of underlying stocks. In particular, we show that on expiration dates the closing prices of stocks with listed options cluster at option strike prices. On each expiration date, the returns of optionable stocks are...

A firm hiring new workers has a choice: it can either hire permanentquot; workers, which means entering into a quot;life-time employmentquot; (long term) contract with them, or quot;temporaryquot; ones, who can be hired and fired according to current needs. We assume that the latter are less...

Most models of trade in speculative markets make the assumption that agents interpret public information identically. We provide empirical evidence that this assumption is overly restrictive. We begin by investigating the relation between the volume of trade and stock returns (NYSE, AMEX and...

Spread options are options whose payoff is based on the difference in the prices of two underlying assets. The price of a spread option is the (discounted) double integral of the option payoffs over the risk-neutral joint distribution of the terminal prices of the two underlying assets. Analytic...