Search results for " Markets"
showing 10 items of 321 documents
Pricing the Option to Surrender in Incomplete Markets
2010
New international accounting standards require insurers to reflect the value of embedded options and guarantees in their products. Pricing techniques based on the Black and Scholes paradigm are often used; however, the hypotheses underneath this model are rarely met. We propose a framework that encompasses the most known sources of incompleteness. We show that the surrender option, joined with a wide range of claims embedded in insurance contracts, can be priced through our tool, and deliver hedging portfolios to mitigate the risk arising from their positions. We provide extensive empirical analysis to highlight the effect of incompleteness on the fair value of the option.
The welfare cost of unpriced heterogeneity in insurance markets
2016
We consider the welfare loss of unpriced heterogeneity in insurance markets, which results when private information or regulatory constraints prevent insurance companies to set premiums reflecting expected costs. We propose a methodology which uses survey data to measure this welfare loss. After identifying some “types” which determine expected risk and insurance demand, we derive the key factors defining the demand and cost functions in each market induced by these unobservable types. These are used to quantify the efficiency costs of unpriced heterogeneity. We apply our methods to the US Long-Term Care and Medigap insurance markets, where we find that unpriced heterogeneity causes substan…
Urban segregation and unemployment: A case study of the urban area of Marseille – Aix-en-Provence (France)
2018
International audience; In this paper, we study the effects of the spatial organization of the urban area of Marseille – Aix-en-Provence on unemployment there. More specifically, differences in the characteristics of the residential population induce urban stratification with the result that urban structure may affect the probability of employment. In order to evaluate the effects of spatial structure on unemployment, we implement a spatial probit model to reveal the employment probabilities of young adults still living with their parents. Our results support the hypothesis that living in or near a deprived neighborhood decreases the probability of employment.
Money and equity returns in the Euro area
2010
Abstract This study examines the impacts of liquidity on equity returns in the euro area during the period 1987–2001. The main contribution of the study is that the money demand is carefully considered while estimating the liquidity. We provide evidence that in part the impact of money on equity returns depended on the measure used for liquidity (real money supply, real money gap and monetary overhang). However, a unanimous inference was made that over time an increase in liquidity has a negative impact on equity returns. This is interpreted as being due to the positive impact of money on inflation. Accordingly, an increase in liquidity generated expectations of inflation, which led to a de…
Spillovers through banking centers: a panel data analysis of bank flows
2003
Abstract This paper presents evidence that spillovers through bank lending contributed to the transmission of currency crises during the recent episodes of financial instability in emerging markets. The innovation of the paper is that it looks beyond aggregated measures of contagion into the structure of bank flows, disaggregating by banking centers. The main findings are that spillovers caused by banks’ exposures to a crisis country help predict flows in third countries after the Mexican and Asian crises, but not after the Russian crisis. In the latter, there is evidence of a generalized outflow from emerging markets. The importance of spillovers through banking centers suggests that count…
On measuring speculative and hedging activities in futures markets from volume and open interest data
2010
This paper provides a critical assessment of the line of research that measures speculative and hedging activities in futures markets from volume and open interest data. It makes several contributions. First, a detailed theoretical analysis of the measures proposed in the previous literature as proxies for speculative activity clarifies the circumstances in which they fail, as well as the assumptions that have to be made, when they are used as intended. Second, we propose a new way of combining the volume and the open interest figures, which provides additional information regarding the type of trading activity that takes place in the market on a given date. Finally, we analyse empirically …
Fatal attraction: Using distance to measure contagion in good times as well as bad
2007
This paper proposes a new measure of contagion that is good at anticipating future vulnerabilities. Building on previous work, it uses correlations of equity markets across countries to measure contagion, but in a departure from previous practice measures contagion using the relationship of these correlations with distance. Also in contrast to previous work, our test is good at identifying periods of “positive contagion,” in which capital flows to emerging markets in a herd-like manner largely unrelated to fundamentals. Identifying such periods of “fatal attraction” is important as they provide the essential ingredients for subsequent crises and rapid outflows of capital.
Extreme interdependence and extreme contagion between emerging markets
2007
Abstract This paper uses seemingly unrelated probit techniques to separate the transmission of a crisis due to broadly defined macroeconomic interdependence from contagion due to herding, avoiding some of the caveats of the more traditional cross-correlation approach. We find that pure contagion occurred in a limited number of country pairs generally belonging to the same region. A reduction in speculative pressure can also be identified between countries in different regional blocks. This seems to suggest that after an initial crisis episode, investors tend to discriminate on the basis of location and common macroeconomic weakness or perceived similarity.
Liquidity and dirty hedging in the Nordic electricity market
2012
Abstract Hedging involves tradeoffs in incomplete markets because the number of hedging instruments is limited. Even when an extensive set of hedging instruments is available, the ease with which these instruments can be traded may be highly variable. This study finds systematic variations in liquidity in different segments of the Nordic electricity swap market and analyzes the potential for replacing low-liquidity, delivery-period-matched hedging instruments with more liquid, delivery-period-mismatched hedging instruments. When the costs of implementing such dirty hedging strategies are lower than those of the replaced hedging instruments and the loss of hedge effectiveness is small, dirty…
The Legacy and the Tyranny of Time: Exit and Re-Entry of Sovereigns to International Capital Markets
2018
We use a novel continuous-time Weibull model (without and) with a change-point in the duration dependence parameter to investigate the duration of the exit and re-entry of sovereigns to international capital markets. Relying on annual data for a large panel of countries over the period 1970-2011, we find that, as the reputation of debtor countries as good (bad) borrowers solidifies over time, those episodes are more likely to end - i.e. the "legacy of time". Debtor countries can take advantage of the "benefit of doubt" of creditors during short exit spells. However, when exits are long and the reputation as a bad borrower emerges, no more "complacency" makes it more difficult for them to bo…