Banking fragility and liquidity creation: options as a substitute for deposits

Diamond and Rajan (J Finance 55:2431–2465, 2000; Am Econ Rev Papers Proc 91:422–425, 2001a; Carnegie–Rochester Conf Series Public Policy 54:37–71, 2001b; J Pol Econ 109:287–327, 2001c) have shown in a series of papers that it is precisely the fragility of their capital structure which allows banks to create liquidity. This is because the threat of runs by depositors forces bankers to extract full repayment on otherwise illiquid assets. This result has important implications for financial regulation, such as for capital requirements and deposit insurance. This note shows that put options held by bank owners dominate deposit financing in that they also discipline bankers but do not give rise to inefficient runs. Fragility is thus not necessary for liquidity creation in the Diamond–Rajan framework. This paper has substantially benefitted from the comments and suggestions of an anonymous referee.     

Underwriting and investment risks in the property-liability insurance industry: evidence prior to the 9–11 event

Underwriting and investment are two important and related business activities of insurance companies. However, studies on the interrelation between underwriting and investment risks of Property-Liability (P-L) insurance companies are sparse in the literature. Using a sample of US P-L insurers, this article conducts an empirical investigation of how these two risks are associated with each other in the 1994–2000 period (before the September 11th terrorist attack in 2001). Our results, robust to various estimations, suggest that there is no significant relationship between the underwriting and investment risks among our sample firms. Such results based on pre 9–11 event period provide some support for the conjecture of Achleitner et al. (Geneva Pap Risk Insur Issues Pract 27:275–282, 2002) that many insurance companies may have failed to take an integrated approach to risk management. This resulted in a heavy loss due to dual exposures in both underwriting and investment in the 9–11 event. In the aftermath of the recent global financial crisis, risk taking and risk management of financial institutions have received more attention and increasing scrutiny. We believe the current paper provides some useful insights in this vein.     

A super-replication theorem in Kabanov’s model of transaction costs

We prove a general version of the super-replication theorem, which applies to Kabanov’s model of foreign exchange markets under proportional transaction costs. The market is described by a matrix-valued càdlàg bid-ask process evolving in continuous time. We propose a new definition of admissible portfolio processes as predictable (not necessarily right- or left- continuous) processes of finite variation related to the bid-ask process by economically meaningful relations. Under the assumption of existence of a strictly consistent price system (SCPS), we prove a closedness property for the set of attainable vector-valued contingent claims. We then obtain the super-replication theorem as a consequence of that property, thus generalizing to possibly discontinuous bid-ask processes analogous results obtained by Kabanov (Financ. Stoch. 3, 237–248, 1999), Kabanov and Last (Math. Financ. 12, 63–70, 2002) and Kabanov and Stricker (Advances in Finance and Stochastics: Essays in Honour of Dieter Sondermann, pp 125–136, 2002). Rásonyi’s counter-example (Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1832, 394–398, 2003) served as an important motivation for our approach.     

On the calibration of structural credit spread models

Empirical findings are mixed about the performance of structural models for term structure of credit spreads. It is commonly believed that all structural models have equally poor performance after calibration. However, proper calibration is not a trivial issue, especially for highly structural models. This paper proposes a more accurate procedure for calibrating two models: Leland–Toft (J Finance 51:987–1019, 1996) and Collin-Dufresne and Goldstein (J Finance 56:2177–2208, 2001). Using rating-based bond data, we find that the Leland–Toft model has significantly greater explanatory power for credit spreads across rating categories than previously reported. We provide theoretical explanations for these findings, and further extend our empirical analysis to include 286 individual senior bonds. Our findings help clarify the controversies over the performance of structural models in general and that of the Leland–Toft model in particular. In addition, we offer a rigorous procedure that can be used for calibrating other structural models more effectively.      

A remark on static hedging of options written on the last exit time

In this paper, several different static hedges of the option written on the last exit time are given. One of them was originally presented in Akahori et al. (Methodol Comput Appl Probab 11(4): 661–668, 2009). Another one is derived from an expression in Madan et al. (Asia Pac Financ Mark 15(2): 97–115, 2008d). It is remarked in this paper that these static hedges are also obtained by applying a method in Carr and Chou (Hedging complex barrier options, 2001).     

Coefficients of Asymptotic Expansions of SDE with Jumps

A new methodology for the problem of contingent claim valuation is proposed by Yoshida (Journal of Japanese Statistical Society, 22(2): 139–159, 1992, Stochastic Processes Application, 107(1): 53–81, 2003), and Takahashi and Kunitomo (2003). They used the asymptotic expansion theorem of Watanabe. Their method is applicable to various problems of contingent claim valuation. The author has obtained the asymptotic expansion formula for European call option of pure jump models (2008). In this paper, we determine the coefficients of the asymptotic expansion formula in order to test this formula numerically.     

Nonparametric Estimation of Households’ Duration of Residence from Panel Data

In this paper we present a method that estimates the total duration of permanency for residential households starting from the lengths of stay declared by families in a micro panel survey. Throughout this study Spanish data are taken from the European Household Panel established between 1994 and 2001. The inference is based on those households surveyed in 1994 and onwards, including those who moved into their 1994-current residence after 1979. The follow-up of the household is conducted until the house is vacated or the sample observed in (year 2001) is finalized. We distinguish amongst owners, renters, and rent-free occupants or squatters (others), since these groups of households are known to exhibit a different pattern regarding residence time. Our approach for estimation is purely non parametric. This is an interesting feature, since we show that the renewal processes which represent the households’ mobility have a non-constant rate over the period 1980–1994 for owners and rent-free occupants. This fact invalidates the method of inference based on the equilibrium equation proposed by Anily et al. J Bus Econ Stat 17:373–381, 1999) in order to estimate the lengths of stay in each household.     

Minimal sufficient conditions for a primal optimizer in nonsmooth utility maximization

We continue the study of utility maximization in the nonsmooth setting and give a counterexample to a conjecture made in Deelstra et al. (Ann. Appl. Probab. 11:1353–1383, 2001) on the optimality of random variables valued in an appropriate subdifferential. We derive minimal sufficient conditions on a random variable for it to be a primal optimizer in the case where the utility function is not strictly concave.     

Stochastic equilibria for economies under uncertainty with intertemporal substitution

We consider the model of a stochastic pure exchange economy with a finite set of agents whose preferences exhibit local substitution in the sense of Hindy and Huang (1992). In order to prove the existence of Arrow–Debreu equilibria, it is assumed in Bank and Riedel (2001) that smooth subgradients exist (Assumption 1 in Bank and Riedel (2001)) and that they are uniformly bounded from above and away from zero (Assumption 2 in Bank and Riedel 2001). In this paper, we prove that the existence of smooth subgradients implies local properness of preferences. By a slight improvement of classical existence results of the literature, we prove that the local properness of preferences is a sufficient condition for the existence of equilibria, rendering Assumption 2 in Bank and Riedel (2001) superfluous. This work was partially done while F. Riedel was visiting Ceremade at Université Paris–Dauphine     

Alternatives to the normal model of stock returns: Gaussian mixture, generalised logF and generalised hyperbolic models

Simple parametric models of the marginal distribution of stock returns are an essential building block in many areas of applied finance. Even though it is well known that the normal distribution fails to represent most of the “stylised” facts characterising return distributions, it still dominates much of the applied work in finance. Using monthly S&P 500 stock index returns (1871–2005) as well as daily returns (2001–2005), we investigate the viability of three alternative parametric families to represent both the stylised and empirical facts: the generalised hyperbolic distribution, the generalised logF distribution, and finite mixtures of Gaussians. For monthly return data, all three alternatives give reasonable fits for all sub-periods. However, the generalised hyperbolic distribution fails to describe some features of the marginal distributions in some sub-periods. The daily return data are much more symmetric and expose another problem for all three distributions: the parameters describing the behaviour of the tails also influence the scale so that simpler alternatives or restricted parameterisations are called for.      

Capital market equilibrium without riskless assets: heterogeneous expectations

The existence theorem of Allingham (Econometrica 59:1169–1174, 1991) for the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) is generalized to the case where agents have heterogeneous expectations on the return distribution and the mean-variance utility functions are quasiconcave. This result is built upon new conditions which are distinct from and weaker than the conditions imposed on the CAPM in the literature.