Nach dem Ausbruch der Subprime-Krise vor einem halben Jahr zeigten sich rasch weltweit an unerwarteten Stellen unerwartete Schäden in unerwarteter Höhe. Mittlerweile sind die Ursachen und Mängel, die zur Krise führten, erkannt. Es sind sieben.
This paper develops a continuous-time real options’ pricing model to study managers’ incentives to cheat in the presence of equity-based compensation plans. It shows that managers’ incentives to cheat are strongly influenced by the efficiency of the justice. The model’s main result is that managers have greater incentives to commit fraudulent actions under stock options than under common stocks based compensation plans.
We compare the forecasts of Quadratic Variation given by the Realized Volatility (RV) and the Two Scales Realized Volatility (TSRV) computed from high frequency data in the presence of market microstructure noise, under several different dynamics for the volatility process and assumptions on the noise. We show that TSRV largely outperforms RV, whether looking at bias, variance, RMSE or out-of-sample forecasting ability. An empirical application to all DJIA stocks confirms the simulation results.
Two experiments were designed to explore the existence of systematic differences in risk perceptions and risk attitudes between Chinese and US participants. The first experiment involved ranking monetary lotteries using measures of perceived riskiness and willingness to pay (WTP). Several simple heuristics were evaluated to predict perceived riskiness and WTP. Using WTP responses, Cumulative
Prospect Theory functions were determined for participants from both countries. The second experiment involved ranking multi-attribute real-world risks and associated risk-mitigation programs using measures of concern and preference,respectively. Compared to their US counterparts, Chinese participants are found to be less risk averse, more concerned about risks with higher catastrophic potential, and more in favor of risk-mitigation programs with greater scope of benefit. The results also reveal higher within-group agreement by Chinese participants for all tasks. For both national groups, the within-group agreement was highest when ranking risk-mitigation programs, but lowest when ranking lotteries with negative expected value. The implications of cross-cultural versus cross-task variation are discussed.
We discuss the theoretical and empirical foundations of modern economic theories of cultural transmission. The importance of cultural factors in shaping economic and social transformations has been the focus of a long-standing debate in social sciences since the XIXth Century. Neoclassical economics has remained at the
marging of this debate. However, there has been a recent surge of interest among economists for cultural factors. The economic models of cultural transmission borrow the main ideas from the anthropological literature, but endogeneize the efforts parents exert to transmit specific cultural variants or preference parameters. We distinguish between paternalistic models where parents use their own
values to evaluate their children’s utility, and non-paternalistic or utilitarian models in which parents choose their children’s preferences to maximize the children’s well-being. We discuss recent examples, focusing in particular on corruption, patience, and work ethic.
We propose a new method for pricing options based on GARCH models with filtered historical innovations. In an incomplete market framework, we allow for different distributions of historical and pricing return dynamics, which enhances the model's flexibility to fit market option prices. An extensive empirical analysis based on S&P 500 index options shows that our model outperforms other competing GARCH pricing models and ad hoc Black-Scholes models. We show that the flexible change of measure, the asymmetric GARCH volatility, and the nonparametric innovation distribution induce the accurate pricing performance of our model. Using a nonparametric approach, we obtain decreasing state-price densities per unit probability as suggested by economic theory and corroborating our GARCH pricing model. Implied volatility smiles appear to be explained by asymmetric volatility and negative skewness of filtered historical innovations.
Luca Taschini outlines how collaboration between the academic and the business world has helped one company in the cement industry to tackle the EU emissions trading scheme.
We study investment and disinvestment decisions in situations where there is a time lag 0 from the time t when the decision is taken to the time when the decision is implemented. Applying the probabilistic approach to the combined entry and exit decisions under the Parisian implementation delay, we solve the constrained maximization problem, obtaining an analytic solution to the optimal "starting" and "stopping" levels. We compare our results with the instantaneous entry and exit situation, and show that an increase in the uncertainty of the underlying process hastens the decision to invest or disinvest, extending a result of Bar-Ilan and Strange (1996).
