Weather derivatives structuring and pricing: a sustainable agricultural approach in Africa

The objective of this article is to calculate the price of weather derivatives for different African countries with payout depending on temperature. A new approach for computing degree day contracts is shown and gives another scale to the numerical relevance and practical implementation of the findings. With historical data for each country, a stochastic process based on continuous time with mean reversion representing the evolution of the temperature is determined. Focusing on the Monte Carlo simulation method, the price of each contract and the potential implications to solve several aspects of the threatened African economy are presented.     

The demand for eurozone stocks and bonds in a time-varying asset allocation framework

This paper analyzes the short and long-run demand for traditional financial asset classes in eleven founding eurozone members. Our sample period starts from the introduction of euro till 2017. We calculate the welfare losses stemming from ignoring the demand for domestic and eurozone equities and bonds, for various levels of risk aversion. Our results show that the bonds of eurozone countries are, in general, desirable for short-run only. However, in Ireland, Portugal and Spain the bonds are desirable for both short-run and long-run investment horizons. Stocks exhibit both short-run and long-run desirability for all countries except Greece. The Greek stocks are desirable for short- run only.     

企业期货市场投机行为效应——基于中国有色金属行业的实证研究

随着期货市场发展,期货交易量已远超出实体经济需要,期货市场已成为企业重要的投机场所。基于此,本文主要研究了期货市场投机是否真正有利于提高企业业绩这一问题。首先提出了对企业期货交易行为是出于套期保值还是投机动机的识别方法,在此基础上,基于中国有色金属行业上市公司期货交易数据,研究了期货投机对企业业绩的影响。结果表明：从投资回报的角度看,有色金属行业上市公司的期货投机行为并未为其带来超额收益,反而对企业业绩产生了负面影响。     

Methods of Partial Hedging

In this article we survey methods of dealing with the following problem: A financial agent is trying to hedge a claim C, without having enough initial capital to perform a perfect (super) replication. In particular, we describe results for minimizing the expected loss of hedging the claim C both in complete and incomplete continuous-time financial market models, and for maximizing the probability of perfect hedge in complete markets and markets with partial information. In these cases, the optimal strategy is in the form of a binary option on C, depending on the Radon-Nikodym derivative of the equivalent martingale measure which is optimal for a corresponding dual problem. We also present results on dynamic measures for the risk associated with the liability C, defined as the supremum over different scenarios of the minimal expected loss of hedging C. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

中国农业企业汇率风险应对行为的实证研究——基于企业竞争力视角

本文提出了一个涉外企业汇率风险应对行为的分析框架,并利用352家涉外农业企业调查数据与多元Logit模型,从企业竞争力视角实证检验中国农业企业汇率风险应对行为的影响因素。研究发现,企业竞争力对中国农业企业避险策略选择至关重要,且表征企业竞争力的诸多变量对汇率风险应对行为的影响各不相同:融资能力越强、在技术方面越有优势的农业企业越倾向于使用运营策略规避汇率风险,而国际化程度越高的农业企业越倾向于使用金融衍生工具管理汇率风险;同时,农业企业汇率风险应对行为存在较为明显的地区差异。在此基础上,本文提出中国涉外农业企业应对汇率风险、扩大出口的若干政策建议。     

我国私募基金的风险及防范

我国私募基金面临着法律与政策风险、经营风险、道德风险、市场风险等,投资者的利益受到严重威胁。应采取明确私募基金法律地位、强化对私募基金的监管、培养成熟理性的投资者、适时推出股指期货等措施加以防范。     

Intraday hedging with financial options: the case of electricity

As market intermediaries, electricity suppliers purchase electricity from the wholesale market or self-generate to deliver their customers. However, electricity suppliers are uncertain about how much electricity their residential customers will use at any hour of the day until they actually turn switches on. While demand uncertainty is a common feature of all commodity markets, suppliers generally rely on storage to manage it. Singularly, electricity suppliers are exposed to joint volumetric and price risk on an hourly basis given the physical attributes of electricity. In the literature on electricity markets, few articles compare the efficiency of forward contracts, options and physical assets (i.e. power plants) within intraday hourly hedging portfolios, whereas electricity markets are precisely hourly markets. We analyse portfolios made of forwards, options and/or power plants for specific hourly clusters (9 am, 12 pm, 18 pm, 9 pm) based on electricity market data from 2013 to 2015 from the integrated German–Austrian spot market. Through a VaR model, we prove that intraday hedging with forwards is structurally inefficient compared to financial options and physical assets, no matter the cluster hour. Moreover, our results demonstrate the contribution of ‘out of the money’ options for all hours within volatile spot markets.     

Skew Brownian Motion and Pricing European Options

Abstract

The volatility smile and systematic mispricing of the Black–Scholes option pricing model are the typical motivation for examining stochastic processes other than geometric Brownian motion to describe the underlying stock price. In this paper a new stochastic process is presented, which is a special case of the skew-Brownian motion of Itô and McKean. The process in question is the sum of a standard Brownian motion and an independent reflecting Brownian motion that is similar in construction to the stochastic representation of a skew-normal random variable. This stochastic process is taken in its exponential form to price European options. The derived option price nests the Black–Scholes equation as a special case and is flexible enough to accommodate stochastic volatility as well as stochastic skewness.     

Corporate risk management and firm value: evidence from the UK market

The paper evaluates the effect of corporate risk management activities on firm value, using a sample of large UK non-financial firms. Following recent changes in financial reporting standards, we are able to collect detailed information on risk management activities from audited financial reports. This enables us to gain a better understanding of risk management practices and to investigate value implications of different types of hedging. Overall 86.88% of the firms in the sample use derivatives to manage at least one type of price risk. The hedging premium is statistically and economically significant for foreign currency derivative users, while we provide weak evidence that interest rate hedging increases firm value. The extent of hedging and the hedging horizon have an impact on the hedging premium, whereas operational risk management activities do not significantly influence the market value of the firm.