Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

We assume that the call option's value is correctly priced by Black and Scholes' option pricing model in this paper. This paper derives an exact closed-form solution for implied standard deviation under the condition that the underlying asset price equals the present value of the exercise price. The exact closed-form solution provides the true implied standard deviation and has no estimate error. This paper also develops three alternative formulas to estimate the implied standard deviation if this condition is violated. Application of the Taylor expansion on a single call option value derives the first formula. The accuracy of this formula depends on the deviation between the underlying asset price and the present value of the exercise price. Use of the Taylor formula on two call option prices with different exercise prices is used to develop the second formula, which can be used even though the underlying asset price deviates significantly from the present value of the exercise price. Extension of the second formula's approach to third options value derives the third formula. A merit of the third formula is to circumvent a required parameter used in the second formula. Simulations demonstrate that the implied standard deviations calculated by the second and third formulas provide accurate estimates of the true implied standard deviations.

In this essay, we empirically test the Constant–Elasticity-of-Variance (CEV) option pricing model by Cox (1975, 1996) and Cox and Ross (1976), and compare the performances of the CEV and alternative option pricing models, mainly the stochastic volatility model, in terms of European option pricing and cost-accuracy based analysis of their numerical procedures.

In European-style option pricing, we have tested the empirical pricing performance of the CEV model and compared the results with those by Bakshi et al. (1997). The CEV model, introducing only one more parameter compared with Black-Scholes formula, improves the performance notably in all of the tests of in-sample, out-of-sample and the stability of implied volatility. Furthermore, with a much simpler model, the CEV model can still perform better than the stochastic volatility model in short term and out-of-the-money categories. When applied to American option pricing, high-dimensional lattice models are prohibitively expensive. Our numerical experiments clearly show that the CEV model performs much better in terms of the speed of convergence to its closed form solution, while the implementation cost of the stochastic volatility model is too high and practically infeasible for empirical work.

In summary, with a much less implementation cost and faster computational speed, the CEV option pricing model could be a better candidate than more complex option pricing models, especially when one wants to apply the CEV process for pricing more complicated path-dependent options or credit risk models.

This paper examines the association between institutional ownership and income smoothing through bank loan loss provisions for a sample of Japanese banks during the period 1991–1999. We find that as the percentage of institutional ownership of banks increases, income smoothing via loan loss provisions increases. Additional tests show that there is a significant positive relationship between the extent of income smoothing and the percentage ownership of banks by domestic financial institutions and affiliated (keiretsu) institutions. Consistent with the idea that foreign institutional holders do not play an important role in the corporate governance of Japanese banks, we do not find a significant association between foreign institutional ownership and the extent of income smoothing. Our results imply that institutional owners may play a different role in monitoring income smoothing during the recessionary period in Japan from the normal economic periods studied in most prior studies.

Using returns of 4,916 stocks from 22 developed countries and 15 developing countries, this study examines the relative magnitude of conditional volatility and the international market systematic risk of stock prices in countries at different developmental stages and in various geographical areas. Consistent with the finding of Bekaert et al. (2008), the results of non-parametric Mann-Whitney tests suggest that the stock prices in emerging markets are riskier than the ones in developed countries, measured by both conditional volatility and global beta. Our empirical findings also support the geographical variation in stock risks. Specifically, the equity values in Southeast Asia, South Europe, and Latin America are more volatile than the rest of the world. Similar results can be found in the country-level tests. The time-series analysis suggests that the stock returns in high risk countries tend to be less volatile but the conditional volatility of stock return in less risky countries leans to increase.

Value-added performance measures, such as economic value added (EVA), are promoted as a means to better align managerial incentives and improve firm performance. This paper empirically examines whether EVA adopters outperform a peer group of non-adopters over a long term horizon. It also explores the determinants associated with differences in relative market performance of these two groups. We find mixed results consistent with previous studies. In examining risk adjusted market returns, we find that the full sample significantly underperforms the market. However, during the period of the study, EVA adopters exhibit less negative performance than non-adopters. Moreover, over the entire study period, adopter performance improves in a positive direction, while non-adopters experience a performance decline. Adopting firms also exhibit higher earnings growth and higher returns. In perspective, these results suggest there is some benefit to EVA adoption, relative to a peer group, as adopters outperform their peer group. In a comparison of peer matched groups, firm size and growth opportunities are found to have a significant impact on performance for three size-based groups.

In this paper, we apply several variants of the EGARCH model to examine the role of depreciation of the Indian rupee on India's stock market returns using daily data. Our findings suggest that volatility persistence has been high; depreciation of the rupee has increased volatility; and asymmetric volatility confirms that negative shocks generate more volatility than positive shocks. We also find that an appreciation of the Indian rupee over the 2002 to 2006 has generated more returns and less volatility.

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between European convertible bond issues and corporate governance. After reviewing the regulation of Taiwan's ECB issues, we use the data from publicly traded electronics stocks from Taiwan to perform the empirical study. We found that the larger the company's ECB issue size, the higher the premium at the time of the ECB issue. In addition, we also found that the higher the company debt ratio, the lower the ECB issue premium. Finally, we found that the larger the company market value, the larger the size of the ECB issue.