We develop a model of a firm owned by shareholders and administered by managers who may be either honest or dishonest. When managers have an informational advantage but shareholders retain control, dishonest managers can make false reports that distort investment and thereby reduce firm cash...

We estimate the parameters of pricing kernels that depend on both aggregate wealth and state variables that describe the investment opportunity set, using FTSE 100 and S&P 500 index option returns as the returns to be priced. The coefficients of the state variables are highly significant and...

We characterize the joint dynamics of expected returns, stochastic volatility, and prices. In particular, with a given dividend process, one of the processes of the expected return, the stock volatility, or the price-dividend ratio fully determines the other two. For example, the stock...

In order to find the real market value of an asset in an exchange economy, one would typically apply the formula appearing in Lucas(1978), developed in a discrete time framework. This theory has also been extended to continuous time models, in which case the same pricing formula has been...

In this paper we make use of option pricing theory to infer about historical equity premiums. This we do by comparing the prices of an American perpetual put option computed using two different models: One is the standard model with continuous, zero expectation, Gaussian noise, the other is a...

The paper analyzes the possibility of reaching an equilibrium in a market of marine mutual insurance syndicates, called Protection and Indemnity Clubs, or P&I Clubs for short, displaying economies of scale. Our analysis rationalizes some empirically documented findings, and points out an...

We investigate the effects of information and diversification on cost of capital in a noisy rational expectations model. Assuming a factor structure for risky asset payoffs and two classes of investors, informed and uninformed, we show that in large economies the APT (Ross, 1976) holds and i)...

In this paper, we solve an optimal stopping problem with an infinite time horizon, when the state variable follows a jump-diffusion. Under certain conditions our solution can be interpreted as the price of an American perpetual put option, when the underlying asset follows this type of process....

We present a simple, easy to implement methodology for pricing microfinance loans and loan guarantees using publicly available data on loan write-offs by Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs). Our methodology takes into account the selection bias inherent in available data in that MFIs that do not...

Personal preferences and financial incentives make homeownership desirable for most families. Once a family purchases a home they find it impractical (costly) to frequently change their ownership of residential real estate. Thus, by deciding how much home to buy, a family constrains their...