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...

The gamma class of distributions encompasses several important distributionseither as special or limiting cases, or through simple transformations. In this paper,we established the link between the real and the risk neutral distributions, andprovided a formal proof for the existence of the risk...

For simple problems (only) in stochastic storage, analytic solutions are available,and although simulation is available for more difficult problems, in many casesthis is impractically slow. A new system of partial dierential equations (PDEs),derived via techniques used to value options in nance,...

This analysis reveals the restricted scope of approaches which utilise arbitrage based arguments toprice contingent claims whose payoffs are determined by the outcome of non-zero-sum valuationgames between financial market participants. Many examples of such model formulations can befound, for...