A widely held belief in financial economics suggests that stock prices always adequately reflect all available information. Price movements away from fundamentals are assumed to occur only infrequently, if at all. „False“ prices are supposed to be corrected by the counter-actions of...

We propose a model with heterogeneous interacting traders which can explain some of the stylized facts of stock market returns. In the model, synchronization effects, which generate large fluctuations in returns, can arise purely from communication and imitation among traders. The key element in...

Recently there has been some interest in the credit risk literature in models which involve stopping times related to excursions. The classical Black-Scholes-Merton-Cox approach postulates that default may occur, either at or before maturity, when the firm's value process falls below a critical...

We derive discrete markov chain approximations for continuous state equilibrium term structure models. The states and transition probabilities of the markov chain are chosen effciently according to a quadrature rule as in Tauchen and Hussey (1991). Quadrature provides a simple yet method which...

Capital markets and their related financial instruments make an important contribution to the welfare of Canadians. The Bank of Canada is interested in the efficient functioning of capital markets through each of its responsibilities for monetary policy, the financial system, and funds...

This paper describes the experiences of developing country enterprises, farmers and governments with commodity price risk management and various forms of structured finance. It explores the constraints that these entities face in using modern financial markets, including counterparty and...

This paper explores the growing involvement of new types of non- commodity-sector-related players in commodity futures markets. This includes a discussion on the role of managed funds, the impact of the use of commodity warrants, and the direct involvement of banks. The impact of this new form...

This paper starts with an overview of the current literature on the cost of price risk exposure to developing country farmers. It then discusses market-based price risk management instruments (such as futures and options) that can be used by farmers, as well as various mechanisms through which...

Risk exposure can be efficiently optimized in practical situations, using a new apporach to identification of investor's risk aversion.

This note derives new expressions for the moments of the average of values taken by Wiener paths at an arbitrary number, N, of discrete times. The expressions are closed summations, which entail only the N-th powers of, and the successive differences between, the moments of the lognormal finite...