We entertain the possibility of pervasive factors that are not common across two (or more) groups of securities. We propose a general procedure to estimate the space spanned by the common pervasive and group-specific pervasive factors. In our empirical analysis, we study the factor structure of...

In this paper, recent techniques of estimating implied information from derivatives markets are presented and applied empirically to the French derivatives market. We determine nonparametric implied volatility functions, state-price densities and historical densities from a high-frequency stock...

Microfinance institutions have successfully extended unsecured small loans to poor and opaque borrowers at the bottom of the economic pyramid. This success is largely due to innovative financial contracts that impose joint liability and create dynamic incentives to mitigate the effects of...

It is common practice to identify the number and sources of shocks that move implied volatilities across space and time by applying Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to pooled covariance matrices of changes in implied volatilities. This approach, however, is likely to result in a loss of...