The pricing of basket-spread options

Since the pioneering paper of Black and Scholes was published in 1973, enormous research effort has been spent on finding a multi-asset variant of their closed-form option pricing formula. In this paper, we generalize the Kirk [Managing Energy Price Risk, 1995] approximate formula for pricing a two-asset spread option to the case of a multi-asset basket-spread option. All the advantageous properties of being simple, accurate and efficient are preserved. As the final formula retains the same functional form as the Black–Scholes formula, all the basket-spread option Greeks are also derived in closed form. Numerical examples demonstrate that the pricing and hedging errors are in general less than 1% relative to the benchmark results obtained by numerical integration or Monte Carlo simulation with 10 million paths. An implicit correction method is further applied to reduce the pricing errors by factors of up to 100. The correction is governed by an unknown parameter, whose optimal value is found by solving a non-linear equation. Owing to its simplicity, the computing time for simultaneous pricing and hedging of basket-spread option with 10 underlying assets or less is kept below 1 ms. When compared against the existing approximation methods, the proposed basket-spread option formula coupled with the implicit correction turns out to be one of the most robust and accurate methods.     

Domestic value added and employment generated by Chinese exports: A quantitative estimation

We develop an input–output methodology to estimate how Chinese exports affected the country's total domestic value added (DVA) and employment in the years 2002 and 2007. For every US$1000 dollar of Chinese exports in 2007 (2002), DVA and employment are estimated to be US$591 (US$466) and 0.096 (0.242) person-year, respectively. To implement these estimations, we use hitherto unpublished Chinese government data to construct several completely new datasets, including an input–output table with separate input–output and employment-output coefficients for processing exports, non-processing exports, and output for domestic use. We hypothesize that, in comparison with the export sector, China's domestic sector would be relatively autarkic due to China's history of central planning. We expect that exports would generate less DVA and employment than output for domestic use. Processing exports, which are highly dependent on imported inputs, would similarly generate less DVA and employment than non-processing exports. Our findings support these expectations. For both 2002 and 2007, the DVA and employment effects of domestic final demand were higher than those of non-processing exports, which were in turn higher than those of processing exports. However, with the progress of economic reforms, we found that the total DVAs of exports and domestic final demand have converged from 2002 to 2007.     

Effects of experiential learning on students: an ecotourism service-learning course

Experiential learning is used to address the abstractness of classroom discussion and motivate long-lasting learning. The aims of this study were to measure the effects of a tourism service-learning course on the development of students’ generic competencies and to evaluate the influence of experiential learning on hospitality and tourism education. Preproject and postproject self-administered surveys and postproject reflective journals were completed by students enrolled on a service-learning course entitled Ecotourism in Rural and Developing Regions. The majority of the students were found to value the service-learning course, particularly a service project conducted outside the classroom setting, which made them aware of the needs of the underprivileged within the service community. The students also showed significant improvements in their generic competencies, specifically their teamwork and sense of social responsibility.     

Does economic liberalization promote economic growth in Pakistan? An empirical analysis

The study aims to examine the short and long term impacts of economic liberalization on economic growth in case of Pakistan from 1971 to 2011. Economic liberalization consists of reforms in both trade liberalization and financial liberalization. This study contributes to the existing literature by constructing an economic liberalization index using principal component analysis. Our results show, firstly, that economic liberalization reforms have a positive impact on economic growth in the short run. However, trade liberalization is negatively associated with economic growth in the long-run. Secondly, the estimated coefficients through rolling window show that impact of economic liberalization on real GDP is unstable during the selected period of sample. This study recommends to policy makers to enhance human capital by having more expenditure on education sector. In addition, financial reforms by way of a sectoral credit allocation should be introduced to further promote the economic growth.     

Is the expected utility maximization hypothesis refutable by finite market data: The case of two observations

It is shown that with only two observations on the asset demand functions of an investor, it is not possible to refute the hypothesis of expected utility maximization on the part of the investor as long as the axioms of revealed preference are satisfied.     

A characterization of the normalized restricted profit function

A duality theorem between production functions and normalized restricted profit functions is derived under the assumptions of joint biconvexity and independence of the production possibilities sets. Biconvexity is a natural generalization of the concept of convexity to the case of overall increasing returns which maintains at the same time the conventional property of diminishing marginal rates of transformation (substitution) amongst certain subsets of commodities.Specializing to the twice differentiable, locally strongly convex case, certain identities linking the Hessians of the production function and the normalized restricted profit function are derived. Using these identities, Le Chatelier's principle is demonstrated.     

Regime changes and the sustainability of fiscal imbalance in East Asian countries

The main purpose of this paper is to assess empirically the fiscal policy regimes in five Asian countries using a formal framework based on the government's intertemporal budget constraints (GIBC). To this end, we relied on an array of time-series methods and quarterly data of nearly three decades. Our conclusions are; first, the evidence indicates that the fiscal stance in Thailand and South Korea are on their sustainable path while the Philippines and Malaysia demonstrate only ‘weak sustainability’. Second, revenues are growing at a rate faster than government spending for Singapore, a country that has recorded large surpluses for most of the sample period. Third, the results show a one-way causation from expenditure to revenue for Korea, Singapore and Thailand. This finding indicates that reducing the size of government spending may improve fiscal budget deficits without having to undergo changes in the overall strategy. Fourth, we observed a long-run feedback causality in the revenue–expenditure nexus for the case of Malaysia and the Philippines, which may require fiscal synchronization instrument policies to moderate the post-crisis fiscal imbalances. Together, the results demonstrate diverse fiscal patterns but they should be useful to understand the complexities of economic integration in the region.