The long memory characteristic of financial market volatility is well documentedand has important implications for volatility forecasting and optionpricing. When fitted to the same data, different volatility models calculate theunconditional variance differently and could have very different...

This paper provides new UK evidence on the relationship between managerialincentives and firm risk using a hand-collected database of 3307 executive yearobservations (698 CEO years and 2609 other executive years). We find that therelation between pay performance sensitivity and firm risk...

We find that the decision by a potential acquirer to complete or cancel an announced acquisitionproposal is sensitive to new information generated after the announcement of the acquisition.Both the acquirer and target’s cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) over different windows afterthe...

This paper examines the effect of using different option valuation models to calculatethe fair market value of Executive Stock Options (ESOs) granted to executivedirectors of UK firms. Our key objective is to demonstrate empirically that somecompanies will have greater incentive and benefit from...

Credit risk transition probabilities between aggregate portfolio classes constitute a very useful tool when individual transition data are not available. Jones (2005) estimates Markovian Credit Transition Matrices using an adjusted least squares method. Given the arguments of Judge and Takayama...

Despite the rapid rise in cross-border mergers and acquisitions in the past twenty years, there has been little attention paid to what determines their patterns and, in particular, what influences their behaviour over time. Employing a panel database this paper models the behaviour of foreign...

We value UK executive stock options (ESOs) as American options that areawarded conditional on the probability of the holders achieving some performancecriteria. Unlike the standard Black and Scholes (BS) model, which is universally usedboth in the literature and practice, this provides a more...

In this paper we examine the theoretical conditions under which a firm will have incentives to optimallychoose investment projects of duration that deviates from its stated horizon objective. Our approachconsiders a context in which investment horizon is subject to randomness and its length is...

This paper examines the effects of corporate income taxation on equity prices. There is a current European-wide debate between advocates of tax harmonization and supporters of tax competition. Due to that, the level of importance of corporate taxes on the market value of European firms gathers...

This paper develops a closed form risk-neutral valuation model for pricing Europeanstyle options when the underlying has a mixture of transformed-normaldistributions. Specifically, we introduce the mixture of g distributions, which containsthe mixture of normal and lognormal distributions as a...