Narrow Results

This study examines the association between gender and financial activities among middle- and old-aged adults in Taiwan. We conduct a survey of 221 respondents who attended a seminar on financial activities of older adults held by the Trust Association of Taiwan and participated in subsequent surveys on the community during 2017 and 2018. We found that females are more likely to participate in a greater number of financial activities compared with their male counterparts. In particular, we found evidence to support the positive association between female adults and riskier financial activities, such as stocks and mutual funds. Our findings support the information process hypothesis in which gender is an important factor for determining an individual’s participation in financial activities.

Recently, Ross proposed an idea, now known as the “Recovery Theorem,” that asserts that the real (physical) probability measure can be recovered from the market prices of derivatives. This work has generated a great deal of controversy in the finance literature. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the core idea of the recovery theorem and to examine its implications. In particular, issues concerning the so-called factorization of the pricing kernel will be examined from the viewpoint of the Flesaker–Hughston representation.

Lévy processes, which have stationary independent increments, are ideal for modelling the various types of noise that can arise in communication channels. If a Lévy process admits exponential moments, then there exists a parametric family of measure changes called Esscher transformations. If the parameter is replaced with an independent random variable, the true value of which represents a ‘message’, then under the transformed measure the original Lévy process takes on the character of an ‘information process’. In this paper we develop a theory of such Lévy information processes. The underlying Lévy process, which we call the fiducial process, represents the ‘noise type’. Each such noise type is capable of carrying a message of a certain specification. A number of examples are worked out in detail, including information processes of the Brownian, Poisson, gamma, variance gamma, negative binomial, inverse Gaussian and normal inverse Gaussian type. Although in general there is no additive decomposition of information into signal and noise, one is led nevertheless for each noise type to a well-defined scheme for signal detection and enhancement relevant to a variety of practical situations.

The idea of information-based asset pricing theory, whereby one constructs from the outset the market filtration to deduce price processes of a range of assets to price and hedge financial instruments, is described.