The 2007-2008 financial crises has made it painfully obvious that markets may quickly turn illiquid.Moreover, recent experience has shown that distress and lack of active trading can jump “around”between seemingly unconnected parts of the financial system contributing to transforming...

The long memory characteristic of financial market volatility is well documentedand has important implications for volatility forecasting and optionpricing. When fitted to the same data, different volatility models calculate theunconditional variance differently and could have very different...

Forbes and Rigobon (2002) claim there was no contagion among international stock markets duringthe 1997 Asian crisis, with contagion being defined as an increase in dependence. We revisit thisissue using a more robust methodology based on copula. After controlling for heteroskedasticitywith the...

We systematically examine the comparative predictive performance of a number of alternativelinear and non-linear models for stock and bond returns in the G7 countries. Besides Markovswitching, threshold autoregressive (TAR), and smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) regimeswitching...

In this paper we analyze the source and magnitude of marketing gains from selling structured debtsecurities at yields that reflect only their credit ratings, or specifically at yields on equivalently ratedcorporate bonds. We distinguish between credit ratings that are based on probabilities of...

I examine determinants of stochastic relative risk aversion in conditional asset pricing models. I first develop time-series specification tests with nonlinear state-space models with heteroskedasticity based on Merton (1973)'s ICAPM. I then established the following facts. First, the surplus...

This paper develops a closed form risk-neutral valuation model for pricing Europeanstyle options when the underlying has a mixture of transformed-normaldistributions. Specifically, we introduce the mixture of g distributions, which containsthe mixture of normal and lognormal distributions as a...

The gamma class of distributions encompasses several important distributionseither as special or limiting cases, or through simple transformations. In this paper,we established the link between the real and the risk neutral distributions, andprovided a formal proof for the existence of the risk...

This study investigates the sensitivity of stock returns at the industry level to market, exchange rateand interest rate shocks in the four major European economies: France, Germany, Italy and the UK.In addition to exposure to the market, significant levels of exposure to both exchange rate...

This paper studies asset allocation decisions in the presence of regime switching in asset returns. Wefind evidence that four separate regimes - characterized as crash, slow growth, bull and recovery states- are required to capture the joint distribution of stock and bond returns. Optimal asset...