Note sur quelques inégalités et formules d'approximation

Abstract

Les calcuis pénibles et laborieux que nécessitent trop souvent les opérations d'assurance sur la vie, rendent fort désireux de trouver des formules d'approximation ou bien des inégalités générales, faisant connaître en chaque cas particulier, et avec le moins de travail possible, une limite supérieure ou inférieure des expressions dont on cherche la valeur numérique. Cela est évident surtout au cas où l'on désire senlement faire une évaluation “à peu près”. Les exemples en abondent.     

TARP’s deadbeat banks

This paper tests whether poorly capitalized banks with troubled loan books are more likely to miss their bailout dividends. Privately held banks with weaker core capital ratios, more charged off loans, more allowances for loan losses, and more non-performing loans are more likely to miss their Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) dividends. Banks that issue non-cumulative preferred stock are also more likely to be TARP deadbeats. In addition, banks that missed a bailout dividend in the prior quarter are significantly more likely to miss the next bailout dividend.     

Jim Cramer’s Investing Tips

1.Bulls,bears make money;pigs get slaughtered.2.It’s important to remember that gains,any gains can beephemeral.3.Never buy all at once.Never sell all at once.     

The ECB’s fiscal policy

While the ECB helped mitigate the euro crisis in the aftermath of Lehman, it has stretched its monetary mandate and moved into fiscal territory. This text describes and summarizes the crucial role played by the ECB in the intervention spiral resulting from its bid to manage the crisis. It also outlines ongoing competitiveness problems in southern Europe, discusses the so-called austerity policy of the Troika, comments on QE and presents two alternative paths for the future development of Europe.     

Target’s earnings quality and bidders’ takeover decisions

This study examines how takeover decisions are influenced by the quality of information in target firms’ earnings. We show that bidders prefer negotiated takeovers in deals involving targets with poor earnings quality. Moreover, earnings quality and takeover premiums are negatively related in negotiated takeovers, suggesting that bidders obtain valuable private information through negotiations. We also find that bidders share information risk with target shareholders by paying with more equity for targets with poor earnings quality. These findings are driven primarily by the asymmetric information component of earnings quality (as opposed to the symmetric component) and are observed mainly in inter-industry takeovers, where asymmetric information concerns are greater, rather than in intra-industry takeovers. We conclude that targets’ earnings quality affects bidders’ takeover decisions, particularly in cases of large asymmetric information between targets and bidders.     

CLA’s,PLA’s and a new method for pricing general passport options

This paper is primarily concerned with pricing a general passport option (GPO) within the standard Black–Scholes framework. We show that in all possible cases of the allowed trading strategy, the price can be decomposed into simple portfolios of standard European calls and puts and a contract we call a ‘PLA’ or a put on the log-asset price. For completeness, we also introduce the call on the log-asset price (or CLA) and explore their properties and applications. The decomposition of the GPO into its constituent parts is achieved with the help of the Method of Images to convert certain barrier option payoffs into equivalent European payoffs. This technique considerably simplifies the calculation and adds significant transparency to what is otherwise regarded as very complex problem. Curiously, a spin-off of the method to price the GPO suggests an alternative and simpler way to price lookback options.     

The emergence of humanity’s self-awareness

A fundamental difference between humans and other animals is that humans are highly self-aware while other complex animals are less so; and simple creatures like mosquitos are not self-aware at all. Some researchers believe that self-awareness is an emergent property of a complex neural network. If this is so, then high self-awareness should appear when a neural network approaches the complexity of the human brain (∼90 billion neurons and 10¹⁴ synapses). If one takes a much broader view and considers all of humanity as a neural network, then today there are ∼7 billion individual human elements, of whom ∼3 billion are interconnected via computers, smart phones, tablets, and the Internet. By morphological analogy, as human interconnectivity continues to grow and strengthen, eventually humanity will approach ∼70 billion interconnected humans, at which point we will become highly self-aware as a single human super-organism. This organismal self-awareness may manifest itself as the elimination of wars, hunger, and strife, and as the collaboration of all individual elements working together for the greater good of humanity. It is projected that this organismal self-awareness will occur between the years 2400 and 2600.     

从you must到let’s

科学管理理论奠基人,科学管理之父,弗雷德里克·温斯洛·泰勒(Frederick Winslow Taylor,1856—1915)的时代已经过去将近100年了,但他在管理实践和管理问题研究中采用观察、记录、调查、试验等手段的近代分析科学方法依旧是现代生活生产中提高效率的基本方法。     

Under the Lender’s Looking Glass

This paper studies the impact of bank monitoring on the risk of US equity REITs. Using a unique, hand-collected data sample of mortgage balances, I show that bank screening and monitoring of REIT assets via utilizing secured mortgage financing (vs unsecured, public debt) lowers the overall company risk of a REIT. At the asset level, screening results in retail and office assets with higher acquisition values and located in primary markets, i.e., more transparent assets, being pledged as collateral. Further, I find evidence consistent with the role of lender monitoring for secured mortgage loans and show that properties located in closer proximity to a REIT’s headquarters are more likely to be pledged as collateral for a mortgage.