Widespread violations of stochastic dominance by 1-month Samp;P 500 index call options over 1986-2006 imply that a trader can improve expected utility by engaging in a zero-net-cost trade net of transaction costs and bid-ask spread. Although precrash option prices conform to the...

Widespread violations of stochastic dominance by one-month Samp;P 500 index call options over 1986-2006 imply that a trader can improve expected utility by engaging in a zero-net-cost trade net of transaction costs and bid-ask spread. Although pre-crash option prices conform to the...

Analysts are accustomed to using prices for the information they contain. A stock price, for example, can be thought of as an expected value of future cash flows. Each futures price and option price tells the analyst a bit more about the probability distribution under which those expectations...

Murphy, Koehler, and Fogler [1997] gave in the last issue of the Journal of Portfolio Management an account of how to raise a neural net's IQ. The purpose of this reply is to point out some of the general difficulties with neural nets. Also, I would like to mention an alternative method, namely...

The central premise of the Black and Scholes [Black, F., Scholes, M. (1973). The pricing of options and corporate liabilities. Journal of Political Economy 81, 637-659] and Merton [Merton, R. (1973). Theory of rational option pricing. Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 4, 141-184]...

This paper summarizes a program of research we have conducted over the past four years. So far, it has produced two published articles, one forthcoming paper, one working paper currently under review at a journal, and three working papers in progress. The research concerns the recovery of...

Pension funds only explored alternative assets quite recently, prodded by financial crises which devastated equity returns and led to low bond returns. We assess the addition of alternative assets to pension fund portfolios in terms of the total benefit derived from diversification, addition of...

We study the effect of discrimination against Jewish managers and owners on their firms' stock during the Third Reich. The stock of firms with Jewish managers underperformed by around 5% annually, with abnormal performance persisting on average for three years until firm "Aryanization." Firms...

We update the survey of the pricing kernel puzzle of Jackwerth (2004). We document the pricing kernel puzzle in several markets and present the latest evidence concerning its (non)existence. Econometric studies are detailed which test for the pricing kernel puzzle. Explanations of the pricing...

Starting with the fundamental relationship that state prices are the product of physical probabilities and the stochastic discount factor, Ross (2015) shows that, given strong assumptions, knowing state prices suffices for backing out physical probabilities and the stochastic discount factor at...