International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of the term structure of interest rates in the presence of the systematic risk of regime shifts. The model elucidates the economic nature of the regime-shift risk premium and introduces a new source of time-variation in bond returns. A closed-form solution for the term structure of interest rates is obtained under an affine model using log-linear approximation. The model is estimated by Efficient Method of Moments. The regime-switching risk is found to be statistically significant and mostly affect the long-end of the yield curve.

An optimal investment problem is considered for a continuous-time market consisting of the usual bank account, a rolling horizon bond, and a discount bond whose maturity coincides with the planning horizon. Two economic factors, namely, the short rate and the risk-free yield of some fixed maturity, are modeled as Gaussian processes. For the problem of maximizing expected CRRA utility of terminal wealth, the optimal portfolio is obtained through a Bellman equation. The results are noteworthy because the discount bond, which is the riskless asset for the investor, causes a degeneracy due to its zero volatility at the planning horizon. Indeed, this delicate matter is treated rigorously for what seems to be the first time, and it is shown that there exists an optimal, admissible (but unbounded) trading strategy.

The paper focuses on the market equilibrium conditions in forward exchange quotes. By careful analysis of the market arbitrage conditions, market supply and demand, we construct the equilibrium ranges for bid and ask forward quotes separately. We present our analysis in a bid-ask cost structure setting, and directly tie the equilibrium and arbitrage conditions to specific trading strategies. We conclude that in equilibrium there will be no chance for one-way-arbitrage in foreign exchange and securities markets, provided that non-reversed traders are active and set the arbitrage boundaries. The framework we develop in the paper is convenient for academic study and practical use in currency and security markets.

We study the statistics of earning forecasts of US, EU, UK and JP stocks during the period 1987–2004. We confirm, on this large data set, that financial analysts are on average over-optimistic and show a pronounced herding behavior. These effects are time dependent, and were particularly strong in the early 1990s and during the Internet bubble. We furthermore find that their forecast ability is, in relative terms, quite poor and comparable in quality, a year ahead, to the simplest "no change" forecast. As a result of herding, analysts agree with each other five to ten times more than with the actual result. We have shown that significant differences exist between US stocks and EU stocks, that may partly be explained as a company size effect. Interestingly, herding effects appear to be stronger in the US than in the Eurozone. Finally, we study the correlation of errors across stocks and show that significant sectorization occurs, some sectors being easier to predict than others. These results add to the list of arguments suggesting that the tenets of Efficient Market Theory are untenable.

This paper analyzes the short- and long-term effects of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on a comprehensive sample of stock market indices from 33 industrial and emerging economies. From a finance-theoretic point of view, we employ the international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) to analyze the incidence of the 9/11 event. Consistent with expectations, we document statistically negative short-term stock market reactions to the 9/11 event for 28 countries. More importantly, we find increases in the level of systematic risk for 10 stock markets which attest to the presence of negative permanent effects emanating for the 9/11 event. However, a great many capital markets (including the US, Canada, Japan, China, Russia, and the largest European economies) did not experience statistically significant increases in systematic risk in the post-9/11 period. The decisiveness of the evidence clearly points in the direction of resilience and flexibility of the world capital markets.

We consider the problem of pricing a derivative contract written on precipitation at a specific location during a given period of time. We propose a jump Markov process model for the stochastic dynamics of the underlying precipitation. Our model is based on pulse Poisson process models widely used in hydrology. We develop maximum likelihood parameter estimation procedures to fit our model to rainfall data. In order to price derivatives, we assume the existence of a traded asset whose price dynamics are influenced by the precipitation at the location in question, and we rely on the utility indifference approach. Two utility functions are considered: exponential and power utility. We derive explicit solutions for the exponential and bounds for the power utility.

Finally, we apply our model fitting and pricing techniques to a sample rainfall contract in Norway.

We will develop an efficient method for estimating a smooth nonnegative forward rate sequence using the market price of riskless bonds. This method is an improvement of the classical Carleton–Cooper's method based on standard least square method, which often generates a non-smooth forward rate sequence and hence is not used in practice. The method to be proposed in this paper is intended to resolve this difficulty. We will impose a smoothness condition while maintaining the fitting error within an acceptable level. The resulting optimization problem is shown to be convex in the region of interest. Therefore, we can calculate a globally optimal solution very fast by standard nonlinear programming algorithms. We will demonstrate that this method generates a smooth forward rate sequence at the expense of a very small increase of fitting error.