This paper considers the measurement of the equity risk premium in financial markets from a new perspective that picks up on a suggestion from Merton (1980) to use implied volatility of options on a market portfolio as a direct 'ex-ante' estimate for market variance, and hence the risk premium....

This paper considers the measurement of the equity risk premium in financial markets from a new perspective that picks up on a suggestion from Merton (1980) to use implied volatility of options on a market portfolio as a direct ‘ex-ante’ estimate for market variance, and hence the risk...

Hedging interest rate exposures using interest rate futures contracts requires some knowledge of the volatility function of the interest rates. Use of historical data as well as interest rate options like caps and swaptions to estimate this volatility function have been proposed in the...

The paper describes and compares different methods of extracting the implied probability distribution of the underlying interest rate futures from the prices of traded options on these futures as well as from past futures prices. These methods are applied to short-term contracts on bank accepted...

The existence of risk premium is thought to be the reason why forward exchange rate is not an unbiased predictor of future spot exchange rate. In this paper we review two methodologies for inferring this unobserved risk premium based upon signal extraction mechanism. One approach relies on the...

A market is considered where trading can take place only at discrete time points, the trading frequency cannot grow without bound, and the number of states of nature is finite. The main objectives of the paper are to show that the market can be completed also with highly correlated risky assets,...

We consider the problem of maximization of expected utility from terminal wealth in a market model that is driven by a possibly not fully observable factor process and that takes explicitly into account the possibility of default for the individual assets as well as contagion (direct and...

We consider the portfolio optimization problem for the criterion of maximization of expected terminal log-utility. The underlying market model is a regime-switching diffusion model where the regime is determined by an unobservable factor process forming a finite state Markov process. The main...