The Investment Advisors Act of 1940 (as amended in 1970) prohibits mutual funds in the US from offering their advisers asymmetric incentive fee' contracts in which the advisers are rewarded for superior performance via-a-vis a chosen index but are not correspondingly penalized for...

This paper develops a model for the pricing of credit derivatives using observables. The model (i) is arbitrage-free, (ii) accommodates path-dependence, and (iii) handles a range of securities, even with American features. The computer implementation uses a recursive scheme that is convenient...

This review paper describes basic auction concepts, and provides a summary of the theory in this area, particularly as it relates to Treasury auctions.

We offer an alternative framework for the analysis of mutual funds and use it to examine the rationale behind existing regulations that require mutual fund advisor fees to be of the fulcrum' variety. We find little justification for the regulations. Indeed, we find that asymmetric incentive...

This paper develops a framework for modelling risky debt and valuing credit derivatives that is flexible and simple to implement, and that is, to the maximum extent possible, based on observables. Our approach is based on expanding the Heath-Jarrow-Morton term-structure model to allow for...

We develop, and apply to data on U.S. corporations from 1979-2004, tests of the standard doubly-stochastic assumption under which firms'default times are correlated only as implied by the correlation of factors determining their default intensities. This assumption is violated in the presence of...

We assume that the instantaneous riskless rate reverts towards a central tendency which in turn, is changing stochastically over time. As a result, current short-term rates are not" sufficient to predict future short-term rates movements, as would be the case if the central" tendency was...

We develop analytic pricing models for options on averages by means of a state-space expansion method. These models augment the class of Asian options to markets where the underlying traded variable follows a mean-reverting process. The approach builds from the digital Asian option on the...

That interest rates move in a discontinuous manner is no surprise to participants in the bond markets. This paper proposes and estimates a class of Poisson-Gaussian processes that allow for jumps in interest rates. Estimation is undertaken using exact continuous-time and discrete-time...