infonet-economy

We present a simple new explanation for the diversification discount in the valuation of firms. We demonstrate that, ceteris paribus, limited liability of equity holders is sufficient to explain a diversification discount. To derive this result, we use a credit risk model based on the value of the firm's assets. We show that a conglomerate can be regarded as an option on a…

The article examines strategies for making financial investments by using a decomposition of the non-central tracking error variance to indicate how actively assets are managed. This method examines how much risk the asset manager takes in investments by analyzing positive and negative returns. Two mathematical models are presented to analyze the active management of investments. The…

Abel (2002) shows that pessimism and doubt in the subjective distribution of the growth rate of consumption reduce the equity premium puzzle. We quantify the amount of pessimism and doubt in survey data on US consumption and income. Individual forecasters are in fact pessimistic, but show marked overconfidence rather than doubt. However, the implications for Abel's model depend…

This article examines the pricing and hedging of mandatory convertible bonds on the US market using daily market prices for a period of 498 trading days resulting in a sample of over 14,600 daily price observations. We explore the pricing and hedging performance based on a simple contingent claims model. On average, the pricing errors are lower than those found for standard…

We show how employee stock options can be valued under the new reporting standards IFRS 2 and FASB 123 (revised) for share-based payments. Both standards require companies to expense employee stock options at fair value. We propose a new valuation model, referred to as Enhanced American model, that complies with the new standards and produces fair values often lower than those…

Recent research shows that when commonly estimated dynamic Taylor rules, which are augmented with a lagged interest, are embedded in a variety of macroeconomic models, they imply a greater amount of predictable information about future movements in interest rates than is actually evident in the yield curve. We extend the analysis to consider more generally the predictability of the…

We summarize some methods useful in formulating and solving Hansen-Sargent robust control problems, and suggest extensions to discretion and simple rules. Matlab, Octave, and Gauss software is provided. We illustrate these extensions with applications to the term structure of interest rates, the time inconsistency of optimal monetary policy, the effects of expectations on the…

In this numerical analysis of models for valuing employee stock options, the focus is on the impact of a model on the resulting option prices and the sensitivity of pricing differences between models with respect to changes in the parameters. For most models, the price reduction relative to standard options is uniquely determined by the expected life of the option. In fact, with the…

This paper analyzes how bond option prices are affected by different types of monetary policy. Analytical results from a general equilibrium model with sticky wages show that employment or output targeting typically give lower bond option prices than inflation targeting.