Major events often trigger abrupt changes in stock prices and volatility. We study the implications of jumps in prices and volatility on investment strategies. Using the event-risk framework of Duffie, Pan, and Singleton (2000), we provide analytical solutions to the optimal portfolio problem....

In the setting of affine' jump-diffusion state processes, this paper provides an analytical treatment of a class of transforms, including various Laplace and Fourier transforms as special cases, that allow an analytical treatment of a range of valuation and econometric problems. Example...

We study the nature of sovereign credit risk using an extensive sample of CDS spreads for 26 developed and emerging-market countries. Sovereign credit spreads are surprisingly highly correlated, with just three principal components accounting for more than 50 percent of their variation....

We present strong evidence that option trading volume contains information about future stock price movements. Taking advantage of a unique dataset from the Chicago Board Options Exchange, we construct put-call ratios from option volume initiated by buyers to open new positions. On a...

We propose a broad measure of liquidity for the overall financial market by exploiting its connection with the amount of arbitrage capital in the market and the potential impact on price deviations in US Treasurys. When arbitrage capital is abundant, we expect the arbitrage forces to smooth out...

Recently much progress has been made in developing optimal portfolio choice models accomodating time-varying opportunity sets, but unless investors are unreasonably risk averse, optimal holdings include unreasonably large equity positions. One reason is that most studies assume investors behave...

This paper studies the valuation of assets with debt tax shields when debt policy is a general time-dependent function of the asset's unlevered cash flows, value, and history. In a continuous-time setting, it shows that the value of a project's debt tax shield satisfies a partial differential...

We characterize the joint dynamics of dividends, expected returns, stochastic volatility, and prices. In particular, with a given dividend process, one of the processes of the expected return, the stock volatility, or the price-dividend ratio fully determines the other two. For example, together...

While many studies document that the market risk premium is predictable and that betas are not constant, the dividend discount model ignores time-varying risk premiums and betas. We develop a model to consistently value cashflows with changing risk-free rates, predictable risk premiums and...

We show how to use conditioning information optimally to construct a sharper unconditional Hansen-Jagannathan (1991) bound. The approach in this paper is different from that of Gallant, Hansen and Tauchen (1990), but both approaches yield the same bound when the conditional moments are known....