Substantial progress has been made in extending the Black-Scholes model to incorporate such features as stochastic volatility, stochastic interest rates and jumps.On the empirical front, however, it is not yet known whether and by how much each generalized feature will improve option pricing and...

Substantial progress has been made in extending the Black- Scholes model to incorporate such features as stochastic volatility, stochastic interest rates and jumps. On the empirical front, however, it is not yet known whether and by how much each generalized feature will improve option pricing...

This article offers a tractable monetary asset pricing model. In monetary economies, the price level, inflation, asset prices, and the real and nominal interest rates have to be determined simultaneously and in relation to each other. This link allows us to relate in closed form each of the...

We study the effect of (declining) Confucian social norms on human capital investment and savings rates in China. In our simple two-period model, parents have the option to invest in either a risk-free asset or the human capital of their child. We assume that social norms, and thus enforcement...

What made finance develop in the West but not in China? We argue that long before modern finance, China chose to rely on the kinship-based Confucian clan, whereas the West chose the corporate entity combined with impersonal instruments, to deal with the challenges of interpersonal risk sharing...

This paper investigates whether one can profit from the size, book-to-market, or momentum anomaly, when price-impact costs are taken into account. A non-linear price-impact function is individually estimated for 5173 stocks to assess the magnitude of trading costs. Compared to constant...

Existing studies on market seasonality and the size effect are largely based on realized returns. This paper investigates seasonal variations and size-related differences in cross-stock valuation distribution. We use three stock valuation measures, two derived from structural models and one from...

We hypothesize that besides technology and resource expansion, risk-mitigation improvements pushed the Malthusian limits to population growth in pre-industrial societies. During 976-1850 CE, China’s population increased by elevenfold while the Confucian clan emerged as the key risk-sharing...

This paper provides evidence on the significant impact of illiquidity or non-marketability on security valuation. A typical listed company in China has several types of share outstanding: (i) common shares that are only tradable on stock exchanges, (ii) restricted institutional shares (RIS) that...