A new methodology is proposed to estimate theoretical prices of financial contingent-claims whose values are dependent on some other underlying financial assets. In the literature the preferred choice of estimator is usually maximum likelihood (ML). ML has strong asymptotic justification but is...

I was born in Timmins, Ontario, Canada on July 1, 1941. My father had ventured to Timmins, a relatively prosperous gold-mining region, to practice dentistry during the depression. My mother and her uncle established a chain of small department stores in and around Timmins. The death of her uncle...

Interview with Myron S. Scholes at the 3rd Meeting in Economic Sciences in Lindau, Germany, 22 August, 2008. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.

I was born in New York, New York, on July 31, 1944, the middle child between two sisters, Stephanie and Vanessa. I grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, a village of about 8000 outside the city, in a house that Vanessa and her family live in today. My father, born in Philadelphia the son of immigrant...

Interview with Professor Robert C. Merton at the 1st Meeting of Laureates in Economic Sciences in Lindau, Germany, September 1-4, 2004. Interviewer is freelance journalist Marika Griehsel.

Prize Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1997

Nobel Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1997.

This paper derives a general equilibrium option pricing model for a European call assuming that the economy is exogenously driven by a dividend process following Hamilton's (1989) Markov regime switching model. The derived formula is used to investigate if the European call option prices are...

In this paper we introduce a pricing model for a European call option when the price of the underlying stock (asset) follows a random walk with Markov chain type of shifts in the drift and volatility parameters according to the regime that the stock market lies in, at a given period of time. We...

This paper considers a model where there is a single state variable that drives the state of the world and therefore the asset price behavior. This variable evolves according to a multi-state continuous time Markov chain, as the continuous time counterpart of the Hamilton (1989) model. It...