Based on standard option pricing arguments and assumptions (including no convenience yield and sustainable property rights), we will not observe operating gold mines. We find that asymmetric information on the reserves in the gold mine is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of...

Buying recent winners and shorting recent losers guarantees time varying factor exposures in accordance with the performance of common risk factors during the ranking period. Adjusted for this dynamic risk exposure, momentum profits are remarkably stable across subperiods of the entire post 1926...

Buying recent winners and shorting recent losers guarantees time varying factor exposures in accordance with the performance of common risk factors during the ranking period. Adjusted for this dynamic risk exposure, momentum profits are remarkably stable across subperiods of the entire post 1926...

The bulk of the option pricing properties established in Merton's Classic Theory when the option price is homogeneous of degree one in the underlying's value and the exercise price, are shown to extend to any Markovian diffusion world. The most important result is that calls are increasing...

We provide a monotonic transformation of an initial diffusion with a level-dependent diffusion parameter that yields a second, deterministic diffusion parameter process. Altering the diffusion parameter while maintaining the original Brownian motion at the expense of the drift can be viewed as a...

When the underlying price process is a one-dimensional diffusion, as well as in certain restricted stochastic volatility settings, a contingent claim's delta is bounded by the infimum and supremum of its delta at maturity. Further, if the claim's payoff is convex (concave), the claim's price is...

Firms are more complicated than standard principal-agent theory allows: firms have assets-in-place; firms endure through time, allowing for the possibility of replacing a shirking manager; firms have many managers, constraining the amount of equity that can be awarded to any one manager; and, a...

This paper examines general properties of prices of contingent claims. When the underlying follows a one- dimensional diffusion and interest rates are deterministic, a claim's delta is bounded by the infimum and the supremum of its delta at maturity. Similar bounds hold for the bond position in...

Firms have not historically called their convertible bonds as soon as they could force conversion. Various explanations for the delay rely on the size of the dividends that bondholders forgo so long as they do not convert. We investigate an important change in convertible security design, namely...