(Magill, M., Quinzii, M., 2002. Capital market equilibrium with moral hazard. Journal of Mathematical Economics 38, 149-190) showed that, in a stockmarket economy with private information, the moral hazard problem may be resolved provided that a spanning overlap condition is satisfed. This...

Spatial characterization of non-Gaussian attributes in earth sciences and engineering commonly requires the estimation of their conditional distribution. The indicator and probability kriging approaches of current nonparametric geostatistics provide approximations for estimating conditional...

The importance of the rate of change of the pollution stock in determining the damage to the environment has been an issue of increasing concern in the literature. This paper uses a three-sector (economy, population and environment), non-linear, discrete time, calibrated model to examine...

We present a novel maximum-likelihood-based algorithm for estimating the distribution of alignment scores from the scores of unrelated sequences in a database search. Using a new method for measuring the accuracy of p-values, we show that our maximum-likelihood-based algorithm is more accurate...

The first essay of this dissertation presents a general equilibrium model of a finan-cial intermediary that extends the model first introduced by D. Diamond and P. Dybvig(JPE, 1983) to an infinite-horizon environment. This extension enables the relationshipbetween the real business cycle and...

In recent years, college and universities have relied increasingly upon the charitable contributions of its previous graduates; as the costs of tuition rise substantially, development offices are facing the challenge of creating annual fund campaigns that are minimally expensive while providing...

The goal of any investor is to obtain the highest possible return for his or her money. However for years, the debate has continued; stocks, bonds, mutual funds; which of these financial instruments will produce the greatest gain to give the investor the highest profit? Historically, stocks have...

In this thesis, the research focuses on the development and implementation of two hybrid models for pricing variance swaps and variance options. Some variance derivatives (i.e., variance swap) are priced using portfolios of put and call options. However, longer-term options price not only stock...

The first part of the dissertation concerns financial volatility models. Financial volatility has some stylized facts, such as excess kurtosis, volatility clustering and leverage effects. A good volatility model should be able to capture all these stylized facts. Among the volatility models,...

In this dissertation we propose a new model which captures observed features of asset prices. The model reproduces the skewness and fat tails of asset returns by introducing a discretized variance gamma process as the driving innovation process, in addition to a double gamma process to reflect...