Dilip B Madan discusses how even good financial models often fail to perform when applied to real economic data. To overcome market volatility, he suggests, the right model must successfully reduce dimension.

Four distribution functions are associated with call and put prices seen as functions of their strike and maturity. The random variables associated with these distributions are identified when the process for moneyness defined as the stock price relative to the forward price is a positive local...

For a large class of ℝ+ valued, continuous local martingales (Mtt ≥ 0), with M0 = 1 and M∞ = 0, the put quantity: ΠM (K,t) = E ((K - Mt)+) turns out to be the distribution function in both variables K and t, for K ≤ 1 and t ≥ 0, of a probability γM on [0,1] × [0, ∞[. In this...

We consider a simple single period economy in which agents invest so as to maximize expected utility of terminal wealth. We assume the existence of three asset classes, namely a riskless asset (the bond), a single risky asset (the stock), and European options of all strikes (derivatives). In...

We report on the adequacy of using Sato processes to value equity structured products. In models used to price options on realized variance, the latter must be a random variable with a positive variance. An analysis of this variance of realized variance for Sato processes shows that these...

This article presents a framework for modeling defaultable debt under alternative recovery conventions (for a wide class of processes describing recovery rates and default probability). These debt models have the ability to differentiate the impact of recovery rates and default probability, and...

We analyse the equilibrium asset pricing implications for an economy with single period return exposures to explicit non-Gaussian systematic factors, that may be both skewed and long-tailed, and Gaussian idiosyncratic components. Investors maximize expected exponential utility and equilibrium...

<Para ID="Par1">We show that nonlinearly discounted nonlinear martingales are related to no arbitrage in two price economies as linearly discounted martingales were related to no arbitrage in economies satisfying the law of one price. Furthermore, assuming risk acceptability requires a positive physical...</para>