How does the market value complex structured-credit securities? This issue is central to understanding the current financial crisis and identifying effective policy measures. We study this issue from a novel perspective by contrasting the valuation of CDO equity with that of bank stocks. This is...

This methodological paper presents a class of stochastic processes with appealing properties for theoretical or empirical work in finance and macroeconomics, the "linearity-generating" class. Its key property is that it yields simple exact closed-form expressions for stocks and bonds, with an...

This paper evaluates the forecasting accuracy of correlation derived from implied volatilities in dollar-mark, dollar-yen, and mark-yen options from January 1989 to May 1995. As a forecast of realized correlation between the dollar-mark and dollar-yen, implied correlation is compared against...

In this paper, we investigate empirically the well-known put-call parity no-arbitrage relation in the presence of short sale restrictions. We use a new and comprehensive sample of options on individual stocks in combination with a measure of the cost and difficulty of short selling, specifically...

The notion of model-free implied volatility (MFIV), constituting the basis for the highly publicized VIX volatility index, can be hard to measure with accuracy due to the lack of precise prices for options with strikes in the tails of the return distribution. This is reflected in practice as the...

We study a firm that justifies its novel use of equity derivatives as a cash-flow hedging strategy. Our purpose is to understand the challenge of translating risk management theory into managerial action. Cephalon Inc., a biotech firm, bought a large block of call options on its own stock. If...

The credit crisis was sparked by a shock to fundamentals, housing prices failed to rise, which led to a collapse of trust in credit markets. In particular, the repurchase agreement market in the U.S., estimated to be about $12 trillion, larger than the total assets in the U.S. banking system...

Investors face significant barriers in evaluating the performance of hedge funds and commodity trading advisors (CTAs). The only available performance data comes from voluntary reporting to private companies. Funds have incentives to strategically report to these companies, causing these data...

We study price convergence between the two major markets for wholesale electricity in California from their deregulation in April 1998 through November 2000, nearly the end of trading in one market. We would expect profit-maximizing traders to have eliminated persistent price differences between...

Two proposals are made that may facilitate the creation of derivative market instruments, such as futures contracts, cash-settled based on economic indices. The first proposal concerns index number construction: indices based on infrequent measurements of nonstandardized items may control for...