Optimal replication of contingent claims under portfolio constraints

We determine the minimum cost of super-replicating a nonnegativecontingent claim when there are convex constraints on portfolioweights. We show that the optimal cost with constraints is equalto the price of a related claim without constraints. The relatedclaim is a dominating claim, that is, a claim whose payoffsare increased in an appropriate way relative to the originalclaim. The results hold for a variety of options, includingsome path-dependent options. Constraints on the gamma of thereplicating portfolio, constraints on the portfolio amounts,and constraints on the number of shares are also considered.     

有限责任合伙解析

有限责任合伙,简称LLP,是近年来流行于英美的商业组织形式,特别受到专业人士的青昧.它是对传统合伙与公司各自优点的结合,其意义在于合理限制专业人士法律责任.LLP下合伙人的法律责任及其与债权人利益保护之间的平衡,是有限责任合伙法的核心规则.有限责任合伙这种组织形式对我国的注册会计师以及其他专业人士也有积极的适用意义.     

The emergence and regulation of contingent commitment banking

In but a relatively few years banking has changed considerably. Now it is very much a business of making contingent promises or commitments; and even just a decade ago it was not. Recognizing change is apparently easier, though, than accounting for it. Or than not worrying about it. In this paper, an attempt is made to account for the change from traditional to contingent commitment banking, an attempt which must, however, be regarded as less than brilliantly successful. And responding to the concern that has been expressed by, among others, Federal Reserve officials, it is argued that even if banking keeps on changing until the last vestige of the traditional has disappeared, the Federal Reserve need not in the end be less effective as the U.S. monetary authority than it is at present. There is also a concern, shared by some Federal Reserve officials, that if change persists, then, unless bank regulatory policy is altered appropriately, financial stability will be increasingly threatened. That could be, but as is argued in the paper it is far from obvious that more capital (and/or a risk-adjusted capital requirement) will make bank failures rarer than they otherwise would be.     

Optimal investment and contingent claim valuation in illiquid markets

This paper extends basic results on arbitrage bounds and attainable claims to illiquid markets and general swap contracts where both claims and premiums may have multiple payout dates. Explicit consideration of swap contracts is essential in illiquid markets where the valuation of swaps cannot be reduced to the valuation of cumulative claims at maturity. We establish the existence of optimal trading strategies and the lower semicontinuity of the optimal value of optimal investment under conditions that extend the no-arbitrage condition in the classical linear market model. All results are derived with the “direct method” without resorting to duality arguments.     

Optimal maturity of government debt without state contingent bonds

This paper shows that state contingent debt can be synthetically constructed using non-contingent debt of different maturities. A main policy implication of this principle is that the Ramsey allocation with complete markets can be sustained with non-contingent debt only by properly managing its maturity structure. The numerical experiments, however, suggest that this policy implication ought to be taken with care. We find that the debt positions that sustain the Ramsey allocation are very high (on the order of a few hundred times total GDP for a very simple four state economy) and increasing in the number of states. In addition, they are very sensitive to small variations in the parameters of the model.     

Pricing a contingent claim liability with transaction costs using asymptotic analysis for optimal investment

We price a contingent claim liability (claim for short) using a utility indifference argument. We consider an agent with exponential utility, who invests in a stock and a money market account with the goal of maximizing the utility of his investment at the final time T in the presence of a proportional transaction cost ε>0 in two cases: with and without a claim. Using the heuristic computations of Whalley and Wilmott (Math. Finance 7:307–324, 1997), under suitable technical conditions, we provide a rigorous derivation of the asymptotic expansion of the value function in powers of \(\varepsilon^{\frac{1}{3}}\) in both cases with and without a claim. Additionally, using the utility indifference method, we derive the price of the claim at the leading order of \(\varepsilon^{\frac{2}{3}}\) . In both cases, we also obtain a “nearly optimal” strategy, whose expected utility asymptotically matches the leading terms of the value function. We also present an example of how this methodology can be used to price more exotic barrier-type contingent claims.     

特殊普通合伙制下注册会计师法律责任确认与承担的几个关键问题

特殊普通合伙会计师事务所在我国作为一个新生事物,其法律责任的确认、承担与举证等方面存在诸多不确定问题。本文通过分析特殊普通合伙法律责任中涉及的重要概念,确定注册会计师合伙人法律责任承担的评判标准、顺序、举证责任及有限与无限责任的范围。     

Bad beta good beta,state‐space news decomposition and the cross‐section of stock returns

This study employs an innovative market‐based approach, where return on equity (ROE) is employed as a proxy for cash‐flow news and a state‐space model is used for market news decomposition. We document that the bad beta good beta (BBGB) model of Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004) explains about 30 per cent of the cross‐sectional variations in US stock returns. We also find that the BBGB model adequately explains the size effect leading to its superior performance in this area. Our method controls for the news decomposition method and market news proxies’ bias. We contribute to the literature by providing an alternative easy‐to‐implement and consistent market‐based method for news decomposition.     

会计师事务所推行有限责任合伙制的思考

一、在我国推广有限责任合伙制的可行性与必要性有限责任合伙制度发源于20世纪90年代的美国,虽看似舶来品,但对我国注册会计师行业来说,有限责任合伙其实并非全新概念,至少有限责任与合伙之间的有机联系早在90年代初就已被管理层所接受。     

Set‐off under the European insolvency regulation (and English law)

This paper addresses critically the meaning and effect of the set‐off provisions in the European Insolvency Regulation. The Regulation sets out the authority of EU Member States to open insolvency proceedings and provides that, subject to exceptions, the law of the State that opens insolvency proceedings shall apply to those proceedings. Setoff is one such exception for the opening of insolvency proceedings does not affect the rights of creditors to demand the set‐off of their claims against the insolvent debtor. Set‐off is intended to perform a guarantee type function for creditor claims. Nevertheless, the Regulation does not define what is meant by set‐off nor clarify whether set‐off rights under the law of a third country (such as English law) may be relied upon. The paper provides valuable clarification and critical analysis.     

特殊普通合伙与事务所做大做强

经深圳市四届人大常委会十次会议第二次修订通过的《深圳经济特区注册会计师条例》(以下简称《条例》)于2007年3月1日正式实施。《条例》     

Strategic inventories under limited commitment

In a dynamic storable good market where demand changes over time, we investigate the producer's strategic incentives to hold inventories in response to the possibility of buyer stockpiling. The literature on storable goods has demonstrated that buyer stockpiling in anticipation of higher future prices harms the producer's profitability, particularly when the producer cannot commit to future prices. We show that the producer's inventories act as a strategic device to mitigate the loss from the lack of commitment. Our results provide a rationale for the producer's inventory behavior that sheds new light on the well‐documented empirical evidence about inventories.     

Optimal regulation of network expansion

We model the regulation of irreversible capacity expansion by a firm with private information about capacity costs, where investments are financed from the firm's cash flows and demand is stochastic. The optimal mechanism is implemented by a revenue tax that increases with the price cap. If the asymmetric information has large support, then the optimal mechanism consists of a laissez‐faire regime for low‐cost firms. That is, the firm's price cap corresponds to that of an unregulated monopolist, and it is not taxed. This “maximal distortion at the top” is necessary to provide information rents, as direct subsidies are not feasible.     

Evaluating risk‐based capital regulation

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of risk‐based capital (RBC) regulation and challenges some evidence from the well‐known study by Haldane and Madouros (2012). We reconsider the evidence on the relationship between RBC ratios and failures of US banks from Haldane and Madouros (2012) and find their results are not robust to changes in the sample period or regression model. Using data on US commercial banks from 2000 through 2015 and an improved regression model, we compare banks’ RBC ratios and simple capital ratios as predictors of bank risk. We find simple capital ratios to be significantly better than complex RBC ratios as predictors of bank risk.     

Optimal terms of contingent capital,incentive effects,and capital structure dynamics

Contingent Convertible Bonds (CoCos) with conversion ratios that dilute issuer's shareholders generate incentives to preemptively raise equity capital to avoid triggering conversion. Our dynamic model provides an interior solution for the unique optimal conversion ratio and the capital structure policies that maximizes issuer's value net of deadweight costs. Preemptive recapitalization induced by moderately dilutive conversion terms leads to fewer defaults, lower borrowing rates, and higher debt capacity when compared to less dilutive terms. However, highly dilutive conversion ratios do not always enhance efficiency because issuers facing very high dilution risk recapitalize too frequently, generating excessive adjustment costs. Conversely, if CoCo's principal is written-down at the conversion without diluting shareholders, then the issuer will have perverse incentives to destroy a portion of its capital (“burn money”) to force conversion and generate windfall gains for shareholders.     

The valuation of multivariate contingent claims under transformed trinomial approaches

This study develops a transformed-trinomial approach for the valuation of contingent claims written on multiple underlying assets. Our model is characterized by an extension of the Camara and Chung (J Futur Mark 26: 759–787, 2006) transformed-binomial model for pricing options with one underlying asset, and a discrete-time version of the Schroder (J Finance 59(5): 2375–2401, 2004) model. However, unlike the Schroder model, our model can facilitate straightforward valuation of American-style multivariate contingent claims. The major advantage of our transformed-trinomial approach is that it can easily tackle the volatility skew observed within the markets. We go on to use numerical examples to demonstrate the way in which our transformed-trinomial approach can be utilized for the valuation of multivariate contingent claims, such as binary options.     

Optimal domestic regulation under asymmetric information and international trade: a simple general equilibrium approach

We investigate the design of domestic incentive regulations in a small economy opened to trade and its implications for international specialization and for trade openness to remain welfare‐improving. More specifically, we append to an otherwise standard 2 × 2 Heckscher‐Ohlin model of a small open economy a continuum of intermediate sectors producing nontradable goods used in tradable sectors. Those goods are produced by privately informed regulated firms. Asymmetric information induces distortions with general equilibrium impacts. The small economy becomes relatively richer in the informationally sensitive factor so that asymmetric information might reverse trade patterns. Free trade is Pareto‐dominated by autarky when it exacerbates agency distortions.     

Optimal auction design in two‐sided markets

A key feature of online markets for advertising (e.g., sponsored links) is that clicking rates depend on the searchers' expectations that the platform selects relevant advertisers. This article studies auction design by a platform that maximizes profits in the long run, where clicking rates are mechanism dependent. In line with the practice of the major search engines, the revenue‐maximizing mechanism is a scoring auction that combines the willingness to pay and the relevance to searchers of advertisers. By trading off rent extraction and clicking volume, this mechanism works as a cross‐subsidization device between searchers and advertisers.     

Debt,investment, and product market competition: A note on the limited liability effect

This paper extends a model by Brander and Lewis [Brander, J., Lewis, T., 1986. Oligopoly and financial structure: The limited liability effect. American Economic Review 76, 956–970] on the relationship between capital structure, investment and product market competition based on the limited liability effect of debt. Empirical papers (see for example Campello [Campello, M., 2003. Capital structure and product markets interactions: Evidence from business cycles. Journal of Financial Economics 68, 353–378], and Chevalier [Chevalier, J., 1995a. Capital structure and product market competition: Empirical evidence from the supermarket industry. American Economic Review 85, 415–435; Chevalier, J., 1995b. Do LBO supermarkets charge more? An empirical analysis of the effect of LBOs on supermarket pricing. Journal of Finance 50, 1095–1112]) generally reject the limited liability theories in favor of the predatory theories because leverage leads to less investment and weaker product market competition. This paper shows that when firms also have an investment choice, leverage can lead to weaker product market competition in a limited liability model. In addition, non-zero leverage is still optimal within this model based solely on the limited liability effect. In predatory models debt is motivated by issues outside of product market concerns, for example to solve an agency problem. Finally, this model is also consistent with the investment decisions documented empirically.     

Corporate governance and the cost of debt: Evidence from director limited liability and indemnification provisions

We find that firms that provide limited liability and indemnification for their directors enjoy higher credit ratings and lower yield spreads. We argue that such provisions insulate corporate directors from the discipline from potential litigation, and allow them to pursue their own interests by adopting low-risk, self-serving operating strategies, which coincidentally redound to the benefit of corporate bondholders. Our evidence further suggests that the reduction in the cost of debt may offset the costs of directorial shirking and suboptimal corporate policies occasioned by this insulation, which may explain why stockholders have little incentive to rescind these legal protections.