Interview with Professor Robert C. Merton at the 1st Meeting of Laureates in Economic Sciences in Lindau, Germany, September 1-4, 2004. Interviewer is freelance journalist Marika Griehsel.

Prize Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1997

Nobel Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1997.

We consider option pricing when dynamic portfolios are discretely rebalanced. The portfolio adjustments only occur after fixed relative variation of the stock price. The stock price follows a marked point process and the market is incomplete. We first characterize the equivalent martingale...

Interest-rate derivative models governed by parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) are studied with discrete-time recombining binomial trees. For the Buehler-Kaesler discount-bond model, the expiration value of the bond is a limit point of tree sites. Representative calculations give a...

A valuation model is presented for options on stocks for which Black- Scholes arbitrage does not entirely eliminate risk. The price dynamics of a portfolio of options and the underlying security is quantified by requiring that the excess reward-to-risk ratio of the portfolio be identical to that...

We document a surprising pattern in market prices of S&P 500 index options. When implied volatilities are graphed against a standard measure of moneyness, the implied volatility smirk does not flatten out as maturity increases up to the observable horizon of two years. This behavior contrasts...

We develop a simple robust test for the presence of continuous and discontinuous (jump) com­ponents in the price of an asset underlying an option. Our test examines the prices of at­the­money and out­of­the­money options as the option maturity approaches zero. We show that these prices...

We derive discrete markov chain approximations for continuous state equilibrium term structure models. The states and transition probabilities of the markov chain are chosen effciently according to a quadrature rule as in Tauchen and Hussey (1991). Quadrature provides a simple yet method which...

As is well known, the classic Black­Scholes option pricing model assumes that returns follow Brownian motion. It is widely recognized that return processes differ from this benchmark in at least three important ways. First, asset prices jump, leading to non­normal return innovations. Second,...