Pricing Options with Extendible Maturities: Analysis and Applications

Many common types of financial contracts incorporate options with extendible maturities. This paper derives closed-form expressions for options that can be extended by the optionholder and presents a number of applications including the valuation of American options with stochastic dividends, junk bonds, and shared-equity mortgages. We also derive closed-form expressions for writer-extendible options and discuss the writer's economic incentives for extending an out-of-the-money option. We apply these results to show that corporate debtholders have a strong incentive to extend the maturity of defaulting debt if there are liquidation costs. We model and solve the debtholders' optimal extension problem and show that the possibility of an extension can induce shareholders in highly levered firms to accept negative NPV projects.     

Temporal Aggregation and the Continuous-Time Capital Asset Pricing Model

We examine how the empirical implications of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) are affected by the length of the period over which returns are measured. We show that the continuous-time CAPM becomes a multifactor model when the asset pricing relation is aggregated temporally. We use Hansen's Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach to test the continuous-time CAPM at an unconditional level using size portfolio returns. The results indicate that the continuous-time CAPM cannot be rejected. In contrast, the discrete-time CAPM is easily rejected by the tests. These results have a number of important implications for the interpretation of tests of the CAPM which have appeared in the literature.     

How Much Can Marketability Affect Security Values?

How marketability affects security prices is one of the most important issues in finance. We derive a simple analytical upper bound on the value of marketability using option-pricing theory. We show that discounts for lack of marketability can potentially be large even when the illiquidity period is very short. This analysis also provides a benchmark for assessing the potential costs of exchange rules and regulatory requirements restricting the ability of investors to trade when desired. Furthermore, these results provide new insights into the relation between discounts for lack of marketability and the length of the marketability restriction.     

The TIPS‐Treasury Bond Puzzle

We show that the price of a Treasury bond and an inflation‐swapped Treasury Inflation‐Protected Securities (TIPS) issue exactly replicating the cash flows of the Treasury bond can differ by more than $20 per $100 notional. Treasury bonds are almost always overvalued relative to TIPS. Total TIPS‐Treasury mispricing has exceeded $56 billion, representing nearly 8% of the total amount of TIPS outstanding. We find direct evidence that the mispricing narrows as additional capital flows into the markets. This provides strong support for the slow‐moving‐capital explanation of arbitrage persistence.     

The High‐Frequency Responses of Australian Financial Futures to Unexpected Cash Rate Announcements*

This study examines the high‐frequency responses of Australian financial futures to monetary surprises using intra‐day futures data. Using the event window method with tick data to control for the endogeneity between market interest rates and the cash rate, our empirical findings support the following. First, monetary policy announcements significantly impact not only short‐term interest rate futures but also longer‐term treasury security future markets. Second, the most significant responses of these markets occur in the event window that contains the policy announcement. Third, we also find that the monetary policy is not well anticipated by market participants until the Reserve Bank of Australia’s policy release.     

THE OUTPUT EFFECT UNDER OLIGOPOLISTIC THIRD DEGREE PRICE DISCRIMINATION*

This paper analyses the output effect of price discrimination in a Cournot oligopoly where firms have different costs. Criteria which are based on the demand curves but not on the industry cost structure are developed to determine the direction of output change. Such criteria may provide an analytical basis for assessing regulatory cases and developing empirical propositions in testing the social impact of oligopolistic price discrimination.     

DIMENSIONS OF SATISFACTION WITH PURCHASES OF WOMEN'S DRESSES: BEFORE AND AFTER GARMENT CARE

The purpose of this research was to assess the appropriateness of grouping evaluative criteria used by women in their dress purchases according to instrumental, expressive, and market aspects. Respondents from a random telephone sample were divided into two groups, ‘Care’ and ‘Nocare’, according to whether or not the consumers had cared for (washed or cleaned) their dresses at the time satisfaction was measured. For both groups, factors were generated which were representative of the three aspects of evaluative criteria proposed. The factors reflected expressive, price, selection/size, and performance dimensions of clothing satisfaction. Hence, in analysing clothing satisfaction, researchers must recognize that several functions are served by clothing and reflect these in the research methodology.