1st Quarter (2005)

Mark D. Griffiths and Drew B. Winters Musto (1997, Journal of Finance 52(4), 1861-1882) identifies a year-end effect in commercial paper (CP) and suggests that the price of risk may increase at the year-end. Griffiths and Winters (2003, Journal of Business, forthcoming) show that the timing of the year-end effect in CP is consistent with… Read more

Fayez A. Elayan, Kuntara Pukthuanthong and Richard Roll During 2002 and 2003, 140 publicly traded US firms announced their intention to recognize an accounting expense when stock options are granted to employees. Many similar firms elected not to expense options. We study the stock market’s reaction. There is no evidence whatsoever that expensing options reduces… Read more

Mark B. Wise and Vineer Bhansali This article deals with the problem of optimal allocation of capital to corporate bonds in fixed income portfolios when there is the possibility of correlated defaults. Using a multivariate normal Copula function for the joint default probabilities we show that retaining the first few moments of the portfolio default… Read more

Robert C. Merton and Zvi Bodie This paper proposes a functional approach to designing and managing the financial systems of countries, regions, firms, households, and other entities. It is a synthesis of the neoclassical, neo-institutional, and behavioral perspectives. Neoclassical theory is an ideal driver to link science and global practice in finance because its prescriptions… Read more

Thomas S. Y. Ho Risk management techniques used in banks and trading floors are generally not applicable to insurance companies. Risk measures and risk monitoring approaches must be developed to respond to the challenges to the insurance industry. This paper describes the current risk management practices for both life and general insurance businesses, and proposes… Read more

Sanjiv R. Das and Alistair Sinclair Derivative security pricing and risk measurement relies increasingly on lattice representations of stochastic processes, which are a discrete approximation of the movement of the underlying securities. Pricing is undertaken by summation of node values on the lattice. When the lattice is large (which is the case when high accuracy… Read more