In financial markets people have to cope with a lot of uncertainty while making decisions. Many models have been introduced in the last years to handle vagueness but it is very difficult to capture together all the fundamental characteristics of real markets. Fuzzy modeling for finance seems to...

Efficient Method of Moments (EMM) is used to fit the standard stochastic volatility model and various extensions to several daily financial time series. EMM matches to the score of a model determined by data analysis called the score generator. Discrepancies reveal characteristics of data that...

This paper provides a review of the main features of asset pricing models. The review includes single-factor and multifactor models, extended forms of the Capital Asset Pricing Model with higher order co- moments, and asset pricing models conditional on time-varying volatility.

In this paper, we define a strongly regular quadratic Gaussian process to characterize quadratic term structure models (QTSMs) in a general Markov setting. The key of this definition is to keep the analytical tractability of QTSMs which has the quadratic term structure of the yield curve. In...

This paper is a contribution to the vast literature on the inefficiency in the index options markets. Previous research has found that trading based on implied volatility forecasts do not generate positive profits for the S&P 500 index options but GARCH volatility forecasts do. Trading based on...

Net-worth covenants, as introduced by Black and Cox (1976), provide the firm’s bondholders with the right to force reorganization or liquidation if the value of the firm falls below a certain threshold. In the event of default, however, many bankruptcy codes stipulate an automatic stay of...

We examine whether two commonly used indicators of bank fragility, the subordinated debt spread and KMV’s distance to default, yield signals in line with supervisors’ interests. We argue that supervisors would prefer indicators that are strictly increasing in earnings, and decreasing in...

As a reaction to the general suspicion that margin loans had been a key element of the stock market boom and crash of the late 1920s, the Federal Reserve Bank was empowered to regulate margin lending with the Securities and Exchange Act. The efficacy of the Federal Reserve's margin policy has...

In this paper we study asset prices in a parsimonious two-agent macroeconomic model with two key features: limited participation in the stock market and heterogeneity in the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption. The parameter values for the model are taken from the business...

It is a well known fact that local scale invariance plays a fundamental role in the theory of derivative pricing. Specific applications of this principle have been used quite often under the name of `change of numeraire', but in recent work it was shown that when invoked as a fundamental first...