Search results for "FINANCIAL ECONOMICS"
showing 10 items of 277 documents
Trading leads to scale-free self-organization
2009
Financial markets display scale-free behavior in many different aspects. The power-law behavior of part of the distribution of individual wealth has been recognized by Pareto as early as the nineteenth century. Heavy-tailed and scale-free behavior of the distribution of returns of different financial assets have been confirmed in a series of works. The existence of a Pareto-like distribution of the wealth of market participants has been connected with the scale-free distribution of trading volumes and price-returns. The origin of the Pareto-like wealth distribution, however, remained obscure. Here we show that it is the process of trading itself that under two mild assumptions spontaneously…
The Heisenberg picture in the analysis of stock markets and in other sociological contexts
2007
We review some recent results concerning some toy models of stock markets. Our models are suggested by the discrete nature of the number of shares and of the cash which are exchanged in a real market, and by the existence of conserved quantities, like the total number of shares or some linear combination of the cash and the shares. This suggests to use the same tools used in quantum mechanics and, in particular, the Heisenberg picture to describe the time behavior of the portfolio of each trader. We finally propose the use of this same framework in other sociological contexts.
The stabilizing effect of volatility in financial markets
2017
In financial markets, greater volatility is usually considered synonym of greater risk and instability. However, large market downturns and upturns are often preceded by long periods where price returns exhibit only small fluctuations. To investigate this surprising feature, here we propose using the mean first hitting time, i.e. the average time a stock return takes to undergo for the first time a large negative or positive variation, as an indicator of price stability, and relate this to a standard measure of volatility. In an empirical analysis of daily returns for $1071$ stocks traded in the New York Stock Exchange, we find that this measure of stability displays nonmonotonic behavior, …
American Option Pricing and Exercising with Transaction Costs
2005
In this paper we examine the problem of finding the reservation option prices and corresponding exercise policies of American options in a market with proportional transaction costs using the utility based approach proposed by Davis and Zariphopoulou (1995). We present a model where the option holder has a constant absolute risk aversion. We discuss the numerical algorithm and propose a new characterization of the option holder's value function. We suggest original discretization schemes for computing reservation prices and exercise policies of American options. The discretization schemes are implemented for the cases of American put and call options. We present the study of the optimal tra…
Firm Size and Volatility Analysis in the Spanish Stock Market
2011
In this article, three strongly related questions are studied. First, volatility spillovers between large and small firms in the Spanish stock market are analyzed by using a conditional CAPM with an asymmetric multivariate GARCH-M covariance structure. Results show that there exist bidirectional volatility spillovers between both types of firms, especially after bad news. Second, the volatility feedback hypothesis explaining the volatility asymmetry feature is investigated. Results show significant evidence for this hypothesis. Finally, the study uncovers that conditional beta coefficient estimates within the used model are insensitive to sign and size asymmetries in the unexpected shock re…
Option-Implied Volatility Spillovers between Risk Factors in FX Markets and States of the Global Economy
2016
This study employs option price data to back out the implied portfolio volatilities of the dollar and carry trade risk factors of the G-10 currencies. To investigate expected volatility spillover effects between risk factors in FX markets, we extend Grobys (2015) and Diebold and Yilmaz (2009) by constructing expected volatility spillover indices based upon the forecast-error variance decomposition of Vector-Autoregression models employing option-implied portfolio volatilities. Surprisingly, the dollar and carry trade risk factors that are orthogonal in the first moment exhibit strong stochastic interrelations in the second expected moment. Our findings indicate that expected high spillover …
How Lead-Lag Correlations Affect the Intraday Pattern of Collective Stock Dynamics
2015
The degree of correlation among stock returns aects the possibility to diversify the risk of investment,
Closed Form Approximation of Swap Exposures
2013
This paper provides closed form lower and upper bounds for the price of European swaption on cross currency basis swap with the presence of dynamic basis spreads. Cross currency basis spreads are treated as integrals of spot spreads, approach familiar from interest rate models. The spot spread is modelled by two-factor mean reverting Gaussian model that is equivalent to two-factor Hull-White model introduced by [Hull and White(1994)]. This model allows closed form approximations and relatively well fitting and simple calibration to the spread term structure.
Pricing of Forwards and Options in a Multivariate Non-Gaussian Stochastic Volatility Model for Energy Markets
2013
In Benth and Vos (2013) we introduced a multivariate spot price model with stochastic volatility for energy markets which captures characteristic features, such as price spikes, mean reversion, stochastic volatility, and inverse leverage effect as well as dependencies between commodities. In this paper we derive the forward price dynamics based on our multivariate spot price model, providing a very flexible structure for the forward curves, including contango, backwardation, and hump shape. Moreover, a Fourier transform-based method to price options on the forward is described.
How Tick Size Affects the High Frequency Scaling of Stock Return Distributions
2014
We study the high frequency scaling of the distributions of returns for stocks traded at NASDAQ market as a function of the tick-to-price ratio. The tick-to-price ratio is a measure of an effective tick size. We find dramatic differences between distributions for assets with large and small tick-to-price ratio. The presence of returns clustering is evident for large tick size assets. The statistical differences between large and small tick size assets appear to reduce at higher time scales of observation. A possible way to explain returns dynamics for large tick size assets is the coupling of returns with bid-ask spread dynamics. A simple Markov- switching model is able to reproduce the pro…