Giffen goods and market making

Summary. This paper shows that information effects per se are not responsible for the Giffen goods anomaly affecting traders demands in multi asset noisy, rational expectations equilibrium markets. The role that information plays in traders strategies also matters. In a market with risk averse, uninformed traders, informed agents have a dual trading motive: speculation and market making. The former entails using prices to assess the effect of error terms; the latter requires employing them to disentangle noise traders demands within aggregate orders. In a correlated environment this complicates the signal extraction problem and may generate upward sloping demand curves. Assuming (i) that competitive, risk neutral market makers price the assets or that (ii) uninformed traders risk tolerance coefficient grows unboundedly, removes the market making component from informed traders demands rendering them well behaved in prices.Received: 30 April 2002, Revised: 3 December 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: G100, G120, G140.Support from the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA and the Ente per gli Studi Monetari e Finanziari Luigi Einaudi, are gratefully acknowledged. I thank Anat Admati, Jordi Caballé, Giacinta Cestone, and Xavier Vives for useful suggestions. The comments provided by the Associate Editor and an anonymous referee greatly improved the papers exposition.     

Market clearing and derivative pricing

Summary. We develop a method of assigning unique prices to derivative securities, including options, in the continuous-time finance model developed in Raimondo (2001). In contrast with the martingale method of valuing options, which cannot distinguish among infinitely many possible option pricing processes for a given underlying securities price process when markets are dynamically incomplete, our option prices are uniquely determined in equilibrium in closed form as a function of the underlying economic data.Received: 14 April 2003, Revised: 7 January 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: G13, D52.This paper is dedicated to Birgit Grodal, whose strength and character we greatly admire. We are very grateful to Darrell Duffie, Steve Evans, Botond Koszegi, Roger Purves, Jacob Sagi, Chris Shannon, Bill Zame and an anonymous refereee for very helpful discussions and comments. The work of both authors was supported by Grant SES-9710424, and Andersons work was supported by Grant SES-0214164, from the National Science Foundation.     

Pro-cyclical effect of sovereign rating changes on stock returns: a fact or factoid?

This article examines the effect of changes in sovereign credit ratings and their outlook on the stock market returns of European countries at different phases of business cycle. Using standard four-factor model, it records a significant average marginal effect of credit rating announcements on stock market returns. Both magnitude and significance of the effect vary with business cycle and across announcement types. However, we do not find evidence of pro-cyclical effect of sovereign rating and outlook changes on stock returns. Our results show that stock markets react more negatively to rating downgrades in recovery phases and more positively to rating upgrades in contractionary period. Both results are statistically significant and robust to various sensitivity tests.     

Interest-only and principal-only mortgage strips as interest-rate contingent claims

Interest-only (IO) and principal-only (PO) mortgage strips are valued in a stochastic interest-rate environment. The prepayment rate of the underlying mortgages is affected by two considerations not present in the pure financially rational model: (1) The property owner's holding period is assumed to follow a Gamma distribution, resulting in the possibility of prepayment due to the sale of the property (i.e., prepayment that is too early based on market interest rates); and (2) borrowers are assumed to face heterogeneous transaction costs related to refinancing the existing mortgage, and delay refinancing when market conditions make it optimal to do so (refinancing too late). Properties of IO/PO strips are identified by the finite difference method.     

Economic Risk Factors and Commercial Real Estate Returns

A great deal of research has focused on the links between stock and bond market returns and macroeconomic events such as fluctuations in interest rates, inflation rates, and industrial production. Although the comovements of real estate and other asset prices suggests that these same systematic risk factors are likely to be priced in real estate markets, no study has formally addressed this issue. This study identifies the growth rate in real per capita consumption, the real T-bill rate, the term structure of interest rates, and unexpected inflation as fundamental drivers or state variables that systematically affect real estate returns. The finding of a consistently significant risk premium on consumption has important ramifications for the vast literature that has examined the (risk-adjusted) performance of real estate, for it suggests that prior findings of significant abnormal returns (either positive or negative) that have ignored consumption are potentially biased by an omitted variables problem. The results also have important implications for dynamic asset allocation strategies that involve the predictability of real estate returns using economic data.     

动态资本资产定价理论评述

本文主要讨论了动态资产定价理论的产生和发展.默顿和布里登使用贝尔曼开创的动态规划方法和伊藤随机分析技术,重新考察在由随机过程驱动的不确定环境下,个人如何连续地做出消费/投资决策,使得终身效用最大化.无须单期框架中的严格假定,他们也获得了连续时间跨期资源配置的一般均衡模型--时际资产定价模型(ICAPM)以及消费资产定价模型(CCAPM).这些工作开启了连续时间金融方法论的新时代.     

Regulation and investment behaviour in the telecommunications sector: policies and patterns in US and Europe

This paper reports the results of the quantitative analysis of international experience of the relationship between infrastructure investment in the deployment of capacity that can carry large volumes of voice and data traffic and regulatory policy changes in the telecommunications sectors. It looks at the relationship between infrastructure investment for these infrastructure assets and the access pricing régimes for local exchange carriers in the United States and Europe. It then looks at the relationship between various aspects of regulatory and institutional policy changes in Europe and how they affect access prices.The paper finds that a lower access price promotes greater deployment of digital technology among US incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs). Based on this finding, it suggests that it is in the ILECs interest to have access to their networks encouraged.The European data for interconnection are recent and far reaching conclusions are not feasible, but the findings, however, suggest that competition has worked by facilitating new entry through decreasing interconnection prices, although path dependencies, of existing and traditional concepts, in the mindsets of operators as well as regulators, may account for these findings.     

Frictions, Heterogeneity and Optimality in Mortgage Modeling

The purpose of this article is to provide a unified framework for incorporating frictions into a theoretical options-pricing model (OPM) for mortgages. This article presents formulation for a frictions-adjustable mortgage model that integrates borrower heterogeneity while simultaneously preserving prepayment and default financial decisions. Our model demonstrates the flexibility of the OPM by simulating separate and concurrent effects of three categories of frictions on the mortgage and mortgage components. Researchers can use our example formulation to determine the effects of specific borrower characteristics on mortgage values without destroying the options theoretic framework.     

Convergence of numerical methods for valuing path-dependent options using interpolation

One method for valuing path-dependent options is the augmented state space approach described in Hull and White (1993) and Barraquand and Pudet (1996), among others. In certain cases, interpolation is required because the number of possible values of the additional state variable grows exponentially. We provide a detailed analysis of the convergence of these algorithms. We show that it is possible for the algorithm to be non-convergent, or to converge to an incorrect answer, if the interpolation scheme is selected in appropriately. We concentrate on Asian options, due to their popularity and because of some errors in the previous literature. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.