Market mechanisms are increasingly being used as a tool for allocating somewhat scarce but unpriced rights and resources, such as air and water. Tradable permits have emerged as the most cost effective measure leading to the emergence of both nationwide (SO2 ) and supranational (CO2 ) emission...

We develop a continuous-time real options pricing model to study managers’incentives to cheat in the presence of equity-based compensation policies.We show that managers’ incentives to cheat are strongly influenced by theefficiency of the justice. Our model’s main result is that managers...

In this article the problem of the American option valuation in a L´vy process setting is analyzed. The perpetual case is first considered. Without possible discontinuities (i.e. with negative jumps inthe call case), known results concerning the currency option value as well as the exercise...

In spite of the fact that they can draw on a larger, more liquid and more diversifiedpool of capital than the equity of reinsurance companies, financial markets have failed to displace reinsurance as the primary risk-sharing vehicle for natural catastrophe risk. We show that this failure can be...

Over the period 2002 to 2003, Switzerland and the European Union (EU) were engaged in negotiations regarding banking secrecy. The EU's stated goal was for Switzerland to abolish banking secrecy. Switzerland refused and offered to impose a withholding tax on interest income instead. The two...

This paper analyzes the expected life-time utility and the hedging demands in an exchange only, representative agent general equilibrium under incomplete information. We derive an expression for the investor’s expected life-time utility, and analyze his hedging demands for intertemporal changes...

This paper investigates the extent to which differences in information costs can explain the equity home bias puzzle. In a model where the cost of acquiring information regarding the Foreign asset is higher than for the Home asset, we show that–if cost functions are convex–the expected size of...

This paper analyzes the term structure of interest rates in an exchange-only Lucas (1978) economy where consumers learn about a stochastic growth rate through observations of the endowment process and an external public signal. We allow for deluded consumers, who exaggerate the degree of...

We show that a simple equilibrium model with uncertain growth is able to simultaneously generate patterns in implied volatility and risk aversion that are similar to the ones observed in the data. In addition, the model produces an implied pricing kernel that is increasing for particular levels...

We show in a theoretical model that the expected excess return on any asset depends on its covariance not only with the market portfolio, but also with changes in the representative agents estimate. We test our model by using GMM and compare it to the Fama-French model. The results suggest that...