Valuation of mortgage backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) is the big science of the financial world. There are many moving parts, each one drawing on expertise in a different field. Prepayment modeling draws on statistical modeling of economic behavior. Data...

Exotic interest rate derivatives are hard to value. Care must be taken to make sure that sources of volatility that impact the contingent claim are properly modeled, and that appropriate relationships are maintained between the underlying rates involved.In this presentation, we outline the...

The most widely used option pricing model is the Black-Scholes model.We motivate an alternative option pricing model called the Variance Gamma (VG) model and demonstrate its implementation in the Bloomberg system

We review and detail the causes of errors in numerical differentiation, including roundoff error, convexity error, cancellation error and correlated errors. We discuss methods for improving accuracy, including step size selection and smoothing techniques, as well as a number of approaches...

Lecture notes for a short course on FX option valuation. Includes: - Mathematical framework for FX valuation - Handling the smile and term structure for vanilla options (calls and puts): --- Interpolation issues and techniques --- Handling business time --- Handling market conventions - Pricing...

Tutorial on valuation of mortgage backed securities and collateralized mortgage obligations, including: - Structure of the mortgage market - Prepayment modeling - OAS analysis - Interest rate modeling - Numerical methods - Parallelization

This paper examines the effect of the inherent demand implied by short interest by observing price reactions to earnings announcements based on the level of short interest. We find that for extreme good- and bad- news events, the inherent demand increases stock prices around the earnings...

We study auditors' client risk management in the first year of SOX 404 implementation, and find that there exists a pecking order among auditors' strategies to manage control risk resulting from internal control weaknesses. We first examine the relations between internal control weaknesses and...

This paper examines the potential impacts of artificial smoothing (abnormal accruals) and real smoothing (derivatives) on firm value. We find that the value of the firm decreases with the magnitude of abnormal accruals and increases with the level of derivative use. Moreover, the accrual...

This project applies the methods of functional data analysis (FDA) to intra-daily returns of US corporations. It focuses on an extension of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to such returns. The CAPM is essentially a linear regression with the slope coefficient . Returns of an asset are...