the effect of forward markets on the debt equity mix of investor portfolios and the optimal capital structure of firms this paper demonstrates that the various market imperfections that have been suggested to explain observed portfolio choices and capital structures can be circumvented if securities e g options can be traded that simulate forward contracts on stock it is shown that if the risk adjusted returns to bondholders exceed the returns to stockholders to reflect per sonal tax differences tax exempt investors will prefer a combination of these synthetic forward purchases and corporate bonds to purchasing stock directly they will not as has been suggested include stock in their portfolios for diversiflcation purposes when they can alternatively purchase securities that simulate forward contracts it is also shown that firms that can sell synthetic forward positions on their own stock can essentially guarantee that sufficient funds will be available to meet their bond obligations this gives firms the opportunity to increase their debt levels without increasing the possibility of bankruptcy and the corresponding administrative and agency costs

quantification of market performance as a function of system security the tight coupling between market and system operations in the restructured environment requires a thorough understanding of the interdependence between the market performance and the way the power systems are operated in particular we need to go beyond the qualitative characterization and to quantify the dependence of the market performance on the system security such studies are typically not performed in today s regional transmission organization or rto structures in this paper we develop a general approach to quantify the monetary impacts of complying with a specified security criterion when the deployment of appropriate preventive and or corrective security control actions is fully taken into account this approach is deployed in the day ahead electricity markets and is based on the emulation of the way the rto currently operates the market and the grid the latter in compliance with the security criterion the proposed approach has a wide range of applications such as comparative market performance assessments of different security criteria and the cost benefit analysis of network improvements to mitigate the market performance impacts of a set of specified contingencies we illustrate the application of the proposed approach on the large scale iso ne system to quantify the monetary impacts associated with changing from the current security criterion to two other criteria using the actual 2005 day ahead data the historical system model and the bids offers submitted with the actual market clearing methodology these studies capture in a meaningful way the impacts of the changes with respect to the current security criterion an important finding of this study is that the economic efficiency of electricity markets need not decrease when the system is operated under a stricter criterion

implicit delivery options and optimal delivery strategies for financial futures contracts abstract futures contract specification usually allow the short position some variation as to when where how much and what is to be delivered in this paper we derive the optimal delivery policy for the treasury bond futures contracts and find that our policy produces profits that are positive and statistically significant this indicates that future prices are too high in that the short position can earn profits by skillfully exercising his delivery options we find the actual delivery policies of market participants depart substantially from the optimal strategy the implications of these findings for futures traders and bond dealers are discussed

convergence and spillover of house prices in chinese cities abstractthe issue of house price convergence in 34 chinese cities is investigated we augmented the convergence model with contemporaneous spatial dependence in house prices and found that price convergence and positive spatial spillover are both present we explicitly addressed the endogeneity problem by introducing a bayesian instrumental variable setup which was estimated with particle filtering techniques from a growth poles perspective the empirical evidence indicates that the spread effect in regional house prices outweighs the backwash effect the identified positive spatial spillover has two effects on the growth of house prices in chinese cities first the spillover elevates the trajectories of the steady state growth paths of house prices second the spillover narrows the gaps between the growth paths of house prices in neighbouring cities shocks to the socio economic variables of a city generate their own effects on domestic house prices that dominate the effects arising from cross city p

default premiums in commodity markets theory and evidence we model the effect of nonperformance risk on forward and futures pricing and look for evidence of nonperformance risk in precious metals futures prices from the hunt brothers episode changes in default premiums are measured and related to the sequence of events in the metals markets during this period results suggest first that ex ante costs of nonperformance can be a significant priced factor in commodity markets and second that the arrival of new information is often associated with changes in these costs the evidence has implications for both theoretical and empirical research on commodity markets organized commodity markets offer traders an efficient medium in which to execute their hedging and speculative strategies in particular the markets have developed mechanisms that reduce the costs of nonperformance which would be substantial in the absence of an organized exchange devices such as margin requirements position limits daily marking to market price limit moves and the clearinghouse reduce the expected costs of distress and default in commodity markets while organized exchanges greatly reduce expected costs of nonperformance they do not eliminate such costs throughout the history of organized futures trading there have been many instances of markets collapsing or coming to the brink of collapse after a period of unusual trading activity the most prominent example in recent times is the near collapse of the new

arbitrage continuous trading and margin requirements this paper studies the impact that margin requirements have on both the existence of arbitrage opportunities and the valuation of call options in the context of the blackscholes economy margin restrictions are shown to exclude continuous trading arbitrage opportunities and with two additional hypotheses still to allow the black scholes call model to apply the black scholes economy consists of a continuously traded stock with a price process that follows a geometric brownian motion and a continuously traded bond with a price process that is deterministic continuous trading security market models constitute a significant area of continuing reesearch in financial economics these models form the basis of the option pricing methodology see merton 16 for a review and current intertemporal asset pricing models see merton 15 breeden 3 and cox ingersoll and ross 5 given the importance of these models it is of no surprise that there has been significant academic concern see dybvig 9 cox ingersoll and ross 4 p 341 and ingersoll 13 pp 13 25 over the discovery of a continuous trading strategy by harrison and kreps 10 called the doubling strategy that generates a sure dollar from a zero investment the existence of this doubling strategy violates a basic premise of the option pricing methodology the premise of no arbitrage opportunities given this violation the question naturally arises as to whether the option pricing methodology is internally consistent fortunately harrison and pliska 11 showed that the exclusion of arbitrage opportunities and the doubling strategy does not invalidate the familiar derivation of the black scholes call option formula the exogenous exclusion of these doubling strategies is somewhat arbitrary however types of constraints that exclude continuous trading arbitrage opportunities were studied by kreps 14 harrison and kreps 10 and dybvig 9 these papers provide constraints that are unsatisfactory from an institutional point of view since they have no market analogue margin requirements on the other hand have a market analogue one purpose of this paper is to show that margin requirements also exclude continuous trading arbitrage opportunities to make this argument self contained we first provide a unified framework that synthesizes the previously stated results our assertion concerning margin re

soybean inventory and forward curve dynamics we present two results concerning soybean prices first we exhibit a simple relationship between stocks and price volatility the observation of an increasing price volatility with decreasing inventory is often mentioned in the literature but has so far been documented using a proxy for inventory see fama and french 1987 1988 litzenberger and rabinowitz 1995 instead we reconstruct a yearly quarterly and monthly database of worldwide soybean inventories using aggregate data from the united states brazil and argentina we show that under all time scales price volatility is an increasing linear function of inverse inventory which we term scarcity second we show how the addition of the factor scarcity in a state variable approach to the dynamics of the term structure of soybean forward prices improves the quality of the fit we document this property on a 25 year database of cbot futures contracts and show that the superior accuracy also affects long maturity futures contracts an important property for the valuation of long term origination contracts between producing countries and the agrifood industry

futures market backwardation under risk neutrality j m keynes first introduced the theory of normal backwardation in futures markets in the language of british commodities markets a backwardation is an excess of the spot price over futures prices as is well known keynes suggested that this might be explained as a risk premium less well known is that keynes actually proposed two distinct theories of backwardation of these two theories of backwardation the latter has recently received much attention the purpose of this paper is to formalize keynes first theory his liquid stocks theory with an eye to its eventual empirical test we follow the recent formalizations of the risk premium theory by assuming the existence of perfectly competitive asset markets to emphasize the differences between the two theories however we assume that there are well funded risk neutral investors thus risk premia cannot explain backwardation under our assumptions instead backwardations arise because of interactions between equilibrium in the commodities exchange both in spot and futures trading and the production consumption and storage decisions taken on the real side of the economy

behaviour preferences and cities urban theory and urban resurgence summary the resurgence of big old cities and their regions is real but it is merely a part of a broader pattern of urban change in the developed countries whose broadest tendency is urban emergence including suburbanisation and movements of population to certain sunbelt regions the problem is that it is difficult to accommodate explanation of both resurgence and emergence using the main explanations in the field today these include theories of the knowledge or creative economy urban amenities diversity and tolerance and urban beauty in most of their common specifications they do well for either resurgent or emergent cities but not for both at the same time this suggests that these ideas interesting as they are require much greater specification and in some cases overhaul in order to offer satisfactory responses to the diversity of patterns of urban growth by examining some of these deficiencies we conclude that urban theory needs a better understanding of urban choice behaviours and especially the effects of bundling the limits to preference substitutions and the relationship between past and present preferences in order to become fully effective in explaining urban resurgence and urban emergence when these aspects of choice and preference are better integrated into urban theory then the exogenous causes of urbanisation can be made more endogenous and in addition they can be applied better to both emergence and resurgence urban research can by so doing also potentially become more policy relevant

testing the martingale hypothesis in deutsche mark futures with models specifying the form of heteroscedasticity summary we examine the form of heteroscedasticity in deutsche mark futures price data and compare different specifications of the particular way that the variance is changing over time the martingale hypothesis is tested with daily and weekly rates of change of futures prices for the deutsche mark and some evidence is found against this hypothesis in analyses of daily data from 1981 to 1985 this rejection of the martingale hypothesis may be attributed to trading day effects in foreign currency prices and the resulting day of the week patterns in futures prices when the martingale hypothesis is tested with weekly data the null hypothesis is retained

a simple test for convergence of metropolitan income in the united states abstract the prevalent test for income convergence used in many recent studies of convergence across spatial economic units in the united states is to use a regression equation in which income growth is regressed against the initial level of income this is known as convergence that method however has been crtiticized as an instance of galton s fallacy of regression we devise a simple test for the income convergence hypothesis which does not suffer from galton s fallacy and apply it to all of the metropolitan areas of the united states for the period 1969 1995 for the test we use two income measures per capita personal income and average wages our results conclusively support convergence of per capita personal income and of wage per worker for metropolitan areas in the united states we also test for convergence the hypothesis of diminishing dispersion in income among places over time and find no support for the hypothesis

green expectations current effects of anticipated carbon pricing i report evidence that an anticipated strengthening of environmental policy increased emissions i find that the breakdown of the u s senate s 2010 climate effort generated positive excess returns

a comparison of futures and forward prices abstract this paper uses the pricing models of cox ingersoll and ross 1981 richard and sundaresan 1981 and french 1982 to examine the relation between futures and forward prices for copper and silver there are significant differences between these prices the average differences are generally consistent with the predictions of the futures and forward price models however these models are not helpful in describing intra sample variations in the futures forward price differences this failure is apparently caused by measurement errors in both the price differences and in the explanatory variables

stock index futures mispricing profit opportunities or risk premia this paper reports empirical evidence on stock index futures pricing based on about four years of synchronous hourly data from the uk reported index values are based on firm quotes identified arbitrage opportunities are therefore actually exploitable and economically significant the analysis controls for cash market settlement procedures the results show that ex ante trading rules would have generated attractive profits after transaction costs and after the risks of dividend uncertainties marking to market and possible delays in execution are considered the far contract and the near contract tend to be mispriced in the same direction the mild tendency of futures to be overpriced in rising markets and underpriced in falling markets appears to be unimportant finally significant positive relationships are observed between the absolute magnitude of mispricing and time to maturity and between mispricing and index option implied volatility

diversification specialization convergence and divergence of sectoral employment structures in the british urban system 1991 2001 o donoghue d and townshend i j 2005 diversification specialization convergence and divergence of sectoral employment structures in the british urban system 1991 2001 regional studies 39 585 601 this paper examines the changing employment structure of 150 travel to work areas ttwas in britain from 1991 to 2001 using data from the annual employment survey and the annual business inquiry 20 sectors of economic activity are defined and investigated the analysis clearly identifies the continued shift away from primary and manufacturing employment as increasingly more people are employed in the so called service based and informational economy clear spatial patterns emerge associated with employment change across sectors and these are also explored given the changing pattern of employment and the spatial characteristics of each sector new patterns of specialization and diversification are expected to emerge the analysis identifies these patterns and places their explanation into the context

a multifactor spot rate model for the pricing of interest rate derivatives we propose a multifactor model in which the spot rate libor follows a lognormal process with a stochastic conditional mean under the risk neutral measure in addition to the spot rate factor the second factor is related to the premium of the first futures rate over the spot libor similarly the third factor is related to the premium of the second futures rate over the first futures rate we calibrate the model to the initial term structure of futures rates and to the implied volatilities of interest rate caplets we then apply the model to price interest rate derivatives such as european and bermudan style swaptions and yieldspread options the model can be employed to price more complex interest rate derivatives such as path dependent derivatives or multi currency dependent derivatives because of its markovian property

valuing futures and options on volatility abstract this paper presents simple closed form expressions for volatility futures and option prices and examines their implications for the characteristics of these securities we show that the properties of these volatility derivatives are fundamentally different from those of conventional option and futures contracts this analysis also provides insights into the role that volatility derivatives may play in managing and hedging volatility risk in financial markets

the relation between forward prices and futures prices abstract this paper consolidates the results of some recent work on the relation between forward prices and futures prices it develops a number of propositions characterizing the two prices these propositions contain several testable implications about the difference between forward and futures prices many of the propositions show that equilibrium forward and futures prices are equal to the values of particular assets even though they are not in themselves asset prices the paper then illustrates these results in the context of two valuation models and discusses the effects of taxes and other institutional factors

settlement tax and non synchronous effects in the basis of u k stock index futures abstract the basis in stock index futures markets is analytically and empirically studied in this paper within a no arbitrage cost of carry framework explanatory power improved when the implications of the u k stock exchange settlement system were introduced into the modelling process and until recently with the maturity of the market evidence indicating the presence of non synchronicities between the cash and futures markets was found strong evidence for tax effects upon the basis was not found to be present in the data analysed statistically significant relationships between basis mispricing and volume and volatility were found

financial futures hedging via goal programming this paper presents multiperiod multiple objective goal programming as an alternative to the more conventional hedge ratio approaches to financial futures hedging the described model offers the potential benefits of i simultaneous achievement of multiple hedge related objectives i e minimization of transactions and margin opportunity costs regulation of cash flow and maximization of profits accruing from both the cash and futures positions and ii periodic modification and updating of the futures position as suggested by actual observed prices and interest rates throughout the hedging period to assess its overall effectiveness the model was applied to develop appropriate hedging strategies for three separate time periods each representing a unique interest rate trend i e upward movement downward movement and no change since real world implementation of the model requires the use of forecast data independent forecasts of both cash and futures prices were generated via 1 moving average 2 exponential smoothing and 3 random walk techniques in progressing through each of the 13 week time periods all forecasts were updated with the previous weeks actual price data revised forecasts and actual price data were then incorporated into the model constraints on a weekly schedule this approach in essence provided weekly futures activity recommendations based on the most recent price and interest rate developments observed at any point during the hedging period the realized gains or losses were then compared to the previously derived perfect foresight model results and to the traditional hedge ratio results this allowed for evaluation of the model s effectiveness under varying forecast methods and varying interest rate trends the results show that the goal programming model outperformed other strategies in most cases

currency and credit markets abstract in this paper we focus on two aspects of the relationship between exchange rates and interest rates which have not been widely discussed first the extent to which the forward premia discount in one market can be used to predict the speculative return in the other second the extent to which unanticipated changes in the speculative returns are correlated across markets so that positions in one market can be hedged using positions in the other our results demonstrate that these two linkages are also important factors behind the time variation in speculative risk premia

futures prices on yields forward prices and implied forward prices from term structure when futures contracts are settled with respect to underlying asset prices received theory suggests that the differences between futures prices and implied forward prices from the term structure are strictly due to marking to market ceteris paribus empirical evidence appears to indicate that such differences are small for contracts with short maturities what happens when the futures contract settles to yields implied by future prices of underlying assets the eurodollar futures contract which is the most actively traded futures contract in the united states settles to yield as opposed to prices this unique settlement feature is shown to imply that the implied forward prices from the libor term structure should differ from the futures prices even in the absence of marking to market differences due to marking to market effect are small they are shown to vary between 2 to 45 basis points less than one half percent of futures prices on the other hand differences between implied forward prices and futures prices are shown to be relatively large

the minimum variance hedge ratio under stochastic interest rates in an environment where interest rates are stochastic we examine the case of a pure hedger endowed with a fixed position in a long term bond in contrast to conventional wisdom according to which the difference between hedging through forward contracts and futures is immaterial it turns out that the minimum variance hedge ratio using forwards comprises two terms instead of one only when using futures the magnitude of the difference between the two hedge ratios may be important under some plausible assumptions this result is due to the presence of additional interest rate risk that bears on the profit and loss statement associated with the forward position this sheds some additional light on the respective features of forward and futures contracts written on interest rate sensitive securities

equilibrium valuation of natural resources the purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical investigation of equilibrium spot and futures price behavior in a nonrenewable commodity market the underlying commodity is nonrenewable in the sense that the reserve level of the commodity is expected to decline over time in the absence of successful discoveries of additional reserves i wish to understand how the nonrenewable nature of the commodity influences the intertemporal extraction of the commodity equilibrium spot price behavior and the prices of derivative assets traded on the nonrenewable commodity there is considerable disagreement among economists whether resources are exhaustible in the sense of resource constraints becoming binding on our society in the foreseeable future some economists have argued that natural resources are being depleted at

relative pricing of eurodollar futures and forward contracts past research explains observed spreads between futures and forward eurodollar yields as being due to the futures contract s mark to market feature we derive closed form solutions for this yield spread and show that theoretically it should be small also differences in liquidity taxation and default risk cannot account for the large spreads observed we also present evidence that the spreads which are nonnegligible primarily in the first half of the sample period are likely to be attributable to the mispricing of futures contracts relative to the forward rates and that the mispricing was gradually eliminated over time

stock volatility and the levels of the basis and open interest in futures contracts this article tests a theoretical model of the basis and open interest of stock index futures the model is based on the differences between stock and futures in terms of investors ability to customize stock portfolios and liquidity empirical evidence confirms the model s prediction that increased volatility decreases the basis and increases open interest copyright 1995 by american finance association

stock index futures implications for international capital taxation abstract this paper develops a model of corporate capital structure and investor portfolio choice in an international setting the model s key feature is the stock index futures contract investors and companies specialize in securities based on tax and currency appreciation rates despite this specialization investors achieve complete diversification through futures positions nations should tax interest and capital gains equally and should not tax corporate income this contrasts with the result when futures do not exist in which foreigners desire for diversification provides countries with an incentive to use tax policy to reduce foreign ownership of domestic equity to acquire monopoly rents

value of service reliability the authors present the value of service vos reliability evaluation approach which explicitly incorporates into the planning process customer choices regarding reliability worth and service costs using the least cost planning framework and taking advantage of the recent advances in the quantification of outage costs this approach determines the optimal level of reliability for the utility and its customers the approach considers system operational measures the so called emergency actions that the operators invoke in times of dwindling reserves information on customer outage costs associated with such actions is incorporated using a probabilistic framework this approach permits utilities to plan for levels of reliability commensurate with the customers willingness to pay the application of this methodology to planning problems is discussed numerical results for a large utility are presented

re evaluating the impact of immigration on the u s rental housing market abstract previous studies provide evidence that immigration increases housing prices and rents to deal with endogenous location choices of immigrants these studies often use a shift share instrumental variable approach this approach however fails to adequately account for the natural attraction of immigrants to cities with thriving economies high immigration cities provide more economic opportunities and thus exhibit persistently rising housing prices and rents this paper improves upon the traditional empirical approach by explicitly controlling for initial city characteristics that lead to both increases in immigration and the evolution of rents results suggest that after controlling for endogenous sorting of immigrants the positive effect of immigration on rents is attenuated while the impact of immigrant inflows is smaller an extension of the main results suggests the effects of immigration on rents remains larger than that of native inflows

forward contracts and futures contracts abstract this paper provides a detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between forward contracts and futures contracts under frictionless markets and continuous trading simple arbitrage arguments are invoked to value forward contracts to relate forward prices and spot prices and to relate forward prices and futures prices we also argue that forward prices need not equal futures prices unless default free interest rates are deterministic

an empirical comparison of continuous time models of implied volatility indices abstract we explore the ability of alternative popular continuous time diffusion and jump diffusion processes to capture the dynamics of implied volatility indices over time the performance of the various models is assessed under both econometric and financial metrics to this end data are employed from major european and american implied volatility indices and the rapidly growing cboe volatility futures market we find that the addition of jumps is necessary to capture the evolution of implied volatility indices under both metrics mean reversion is of second order importance though the results are consistent across the various metrics markets and construction methodologies

intertemporal commodity futures hedging and the production decision this paper deals with the producer s optimal use of commodity futures in hedging the framework for analysis is an intertemporal consumption and investment model the producer makes his production decisions at the beginning of the period and realizes his return at the end of the time interval during the period he faces both price and output uncertainties in applying stochastic dynamic programming methods this paper shows the effect of these risks on his consumption behavior further the paper investigates his optimal hedging positions in the futures market over time and his optimal production decisions finally implications of these results on the futures markets are discussed this paper studies a normative model of the farmer s optimal hedging strategy and consumption behavior in a continuous time framework recent papers for example berck 3 rolfo 18 stoll 21 have analyzed the farmer s hedging strategies in a one period context these papers have provided interesting insights into the farmer s production decisions and the optimal design of futures contracts and markets however in a one period model some rather restrictive conditions are imposed on the individual s behavior for example in these models an individual is assumed to ignore any information arrival process as a result the individual is assumed to adjust neither consumption behavior nor hedging positions to the changing state of the world during the production period these conditions can be relaxed in a continuous time framework in an intertemporal context the farmer s hedging problem may be viewed as follows since the farm income at harvest depends on both the spot price and the output in bushels the farmer is subject to both price and output uncertainties during the production period 1 when the farmer can hedge only in the commodity futures market he cannot eliminate both the price and output uncertainties by any hedging strategy 2 as the farm income represents a significant portion of his wealth he must necessarily hold an undiversified portfolio during the production period therefore in essence the farmer must solve for his investment consumption behavior and his hedging strategy facing the nonmarketable asset problem mayers 14 in a multiperiod framework in this context one can see intuitively the major difference between a one

determinants of hedging and risk premia in commodity futures markets this paper examines the determinants of commodity futures hedging and of risk premia arising from covariation of the futures price with stock market returns and with the reve nues of producers owing to supply shocks that stochastically redistribute real wealth surplus between producers and consumers and to limited participation in the futures market the total risk premium in the model is not proportional to the contract s covariance with aggregate consumption stock market variability interacts with the incentive to hedge causing the producer hedging component of the risk premium to increase de crease with income elasticity for a normal inferior good production costs that depend on output raise the premium we argue that output and demand shocks will typically be positively correlated raising the premium high supply elasticity reduces the absolute heding premium by reducing the variability of spot price and revenue

econometric modelling of non ferrous metal prices abstract this article evaluates the significance of the empirical models and the distributional properties of prices in non ferrous metal spots and futures markets published in leading refereed economics and finance journals between 1980 and 2002 the survey focuses on econometric analyses of pricing and return models applied to exchange based spot and futures markets for the main industrially used non ferrous metals namely aluminium copper lead nickel tin and zinc published empirical research is evaluated in the light of the type of contract examined frequency of data used choice of both dependent and explanatory variables use of proxy variables type of model chosen economic hypotheses tested methods of estimation and calculation of ses for inference reported descriptive statistics use of diagnostic tests of auxiliary assumptions use of nested and non nested tests use of information criteria and empirical implications for non ferrous metals

stochastic convenience yield and the pricing of oil contingent claims this paper develops and empirically tests a two factor model for pricing financial and real assets contingent on the price of oil the factors are the spot price of oil and the instantaneous convenience yield the parameters of the model are estimated using weekly oil futures contract prices from january 1984 to november 1988 and the model s performance is assessed out of sample by valuing futures contracts over the period november 1988 to may 1989 finally the model is applied to determine the present values of one barrel of oil deliverable in one to ten years time

evaluating natural resource investments notwithstanding impressive advances in the theory of finance over the past 2 decades practical procedures for capital budgeting have evolved only slowly the standard technique which has remained unchanged in essentials since it was originally proposed see dean 1951 bierman and smidt 1960 derives from a simple adaptation of the fisher 1907 model of valuation under certainty under this technique expected cash flows from an investment project are discounted at a rate deemed appropriate to their risk and the resulting present value is compared with the cost of the project this standard textbook technique reflects modern theoretical developments only insofar as estimates of the discount rate may be obtained from crude application of single period asset pricing theory but see brennan 1973 bogue and roll 1974 turnbull 1977 constantinides 1978 the inadequacy of this approach to capital budgeting is widely acknowledged although not widely discussed its obvious deficiency is its the evaluation of mining and other natural resource projects is made particularly difficult by the high degree of uncertainty attaching to output prices it is shown that the techniques of continuous time arbitrage and stochastic control theory may be used not only to value such projects but also to determine the optimal policies for developing managing and abandoning them the approach may be adapted to a wide variety of contexts outside the natural resource sector where uncertainty about future project revenues is a paramount concern

u s treasury bill forward and futures prices for the period 1976 87 forward rates on u s t bills averaged more than 30 basis points above the comparable futures market rates since risk is common to both rates i argue that this difference can be explained by the substitutability of different maturity t bills for money consistent with this hypothesis i find that this difference depends positively on interest rates and the spread between the federal funds and 3 month t bill rates and negatively on the ratio of short term governments to broadly defined money also significant shifts occurred in the relationship in october 1979 and august 1982 coinciding with changes in federal reserve operating procedures copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

hedging foreign exchange risk using forward foreign exchange markets an extension this study investigates minimum risk hedging ratios and the hedging effectiveness of forward foreign exchange markets for the british pound and the german mark during the period january 4 1982 april 30 1984 these currencies are selected because of their importance in foreign exchange markets and their use as international currencies evidence is strong that the presence of autocorrelation not only overstates optimal hedge ratios but also overstates hedging effectiveness for these two currencies the lower optimal hedging ratios found in this study than in earlier works is thus largely attributed to the adjustment for autocorrelation

time varying risk premia volatility and technical trading rule profits evidence from foreign currency futures markets abstract this paper re examines the efficiency of foreign currency futures markets by evaluating the role of time varying risk premia and volatility in explaining technical trading rule profits the results show that large parts of the technical rule profits can be explained by the time varying risk premia estimated from a general model for the conditional capm the bootstrap distributions for the profits under the null model average one third to one half of the actual profits and enclose the actual profits well within the 90 confidence intervals time varying conditional volatility explains an additional 10 of the profits

the tax dis advantage of a firm issuing options on its own stock abstract it is common for firms to issue or purchase options on the firm s own stock examples include convertible bonds warrants call options as employee compensation and the sale of put options as part of share repurchase programs this paper shows that option positions with implicit borrowing such as put sales and call purchases are tax disadvantaged relative to the equivalent synthetic option with explicit borrowing conversely option positions with implicit lending such as warrants are tax advantaged i also show that firms are better off from a tax perspective issuing bifurcated convertible bonds bonds plus warrants rather than an otherwise equivalent standard convertible

a continuous time equilibrium model of forward prices and futures prices in a multigood economy abstract this paper is a theoretical investigation of equilibrium forward and futures prices we construct a rational expectations model in continuous time of a multigood identical consumer economy with constant stochastic returns to scale production using this model we find three main results first we find formulas for equilibrium forward futures discount bond commodity bond and commodity option prices second we show that a futures price is actually a forward price for the delivery of a random number of units of a good the random number is the return earned from continuous reinvestment in instantaneously riskless bonds until maturity of the futures contract third we find and interpret conditions under which normal backwardation or contango is found in forward or futures prices these conditions reflect the usefulness of forward and futures contracts as consumption hedges

international money and stock market contingent claims abstract we develop a unified approach with closed form solutions for pricing bonds stocks currencies and their derivatives the specification assumes a fundamental risk factor represented by a stochastic positive definite matrix following a wishart autoregressive war process by assuming a volatility in mean specification for the domestic stock returns and the relative changes of exchange rates and a domestic stochastic discount factor exponential affine with respect to the fundamental risk it is possible to derive closed form solutions for the term structures of interest rates and for the risk neutral probabilities while keeping the flexibility of the model in particular i the domestic and foreign term structures are jointly affine and correspond to wishart quadratic term structures which can ensure the positivity of interest rates ii in this framework where the stock price follows a model with stochastic volatility we obtain explicit or quasi explicit formulas for futures and forward contracts swaps and options this extends results by heston 1993 and ball and roma 1994

conditional time varying interest rate risk premium evidence from the treasury bill futures market existing studies of the term structure of interest rates often use spot treasury rates to represent default free interest rates however part of the premium in treasury rates is compensation for the risk that short sellers may default since treasury bill futures are default free they provide cleaner data to estimate the interest rate risk premium the mean excess return in defaultfree treasury bill futures is zero this suggests that the interest rate risk premium could be economically negligible we find that although the mean unconditional premium is zero futures returns contain economically and statistically significant time varying conditional interest rate risk premiums the conditional premium depends significantly positively on its own conditional variance and its conditional covariance with the equity premium the conditional premium is large in the volatile 1979 82 period but small afterwards

market efficiency in the european carbon markets in this paper we study the relationship between futures and spot prices in the european carbon markets from the cost of carry hypothesis the aim is to investigate the extent of efficiency market the three main european markets bluenext eex and ecx are analyzed during phase ii covering the period from march 13 2009 to january 17 2012 futures contracts are found to be cointegrated with spot prices and interest rates for several maturities in the three co2 markets results are similar when structural breaks are taken into account according to individual and joint tests the cost of carry model is rejected for all maturities and co2 markets implying that neither contract is priced according to the cost of carry model the absence of the cost of carry relationship can be interpreted as an indicator of market inefficiency and may bring arbitrage opportunities in the co2 market

mobility and modality trends in us state personal income we examine the mobility and modality trends in us state per capita personal income and its components during the 1929 1999 period we find strong evidence of convergence for states but that the tendency towards convergence and the associated mobility within the distribution varies during the period and especially for the 1980s our analysis of convergence by income component suggests that transfer income contributes more to the observed convergence than does asset income we also note that distributional mobility need not be accompanied by high rank mobility and find that trends toward convergence in the us have tended to preserve rank ordering cet article cherche a examiner les tendances de mobilite et de modalitequant aux revenus personnels par tete et a ses composants aux etats unis pendant la periode qui va de 1929 a1999 il s avere de fortes preuves d une convergence entre etats qui varie au cours de la periode etudiee et qui va de pair avec une variation de la mobilite associee au sein de

economic costs of electricity supply interruptions us and foreign experience abstract this paper investigates the costs of interruptions in electricity service to customers this information is a key input in planning power system reliability using an economic cost benefit approach the paper reviews the literature from the perspective of identifying alternate methodological approaches used their strengths and weaknesses and potential for bias it presents and compares outage cost estimates found in the literature on a common denominator basis it attempts to explain the sources of the wide range of variation observed in different study estimates and it identifies the need for further work on this important topic

exploiting the conditional density in estimating the term structure an application to the cox ingersoll and ross model we propose an empirical method that utilizes the conditional density of the state variables to estimate and test a term structure model with known price formulae using data on both discount and coupon bonds the method is applied to an extension of a two factor model due to cox ingersoll and ross 1985 cir our results show that estimates based on only bills imply unreasonably large price errors for longer maturities we reject the original cir model using a likelihood ratio test and conclude that the extended cir model also fails to provide a good description of the treasury market

stock index futures arbitrage in finland theory and evidence in a new market abstract this paper examines the pricing of stock index futures contracts on the new finnish market the striking feature of the finnish market is that there is no institutional framework for short selling of stocks this has been suggested to be the most important reason for the underpricing futures contracts persistent mispricing would however imply that also early and delayed unwindings have value which increases the arbitrage profits several rollover profits are reported in this study this suggest that current stock owners have not yet begun trading on the finnish futures market on a large scale

intra day tests of the efficiency of the treasury bill futures market in this paper we use intra day prices to examine the efficiency of the treasury bill futures market the use of intra day data allows us to carefully match in time trades in the futures and cash markets by matching trades and allowing delays between observing apparent inefficiencies and the trade we are examining realistic trading strategies we find profitable arbitrage swaps and a preferred strategy for initial purchase these profits do not depend on an assumption of an equilibrium model hence these tests are direct tests of efficiency rather than a joint test of efficiency and equilibrium t his paper examines the efficiency of the treasury bill futures market this subject has been examined before by capozza and cornell 1979 cornell 1981 lang and rasche 1978 rendleman and carabini 1979 vignola and dale 1979 poole 1978 and puglisi 1978 there are a number of reasons why this paper makes an important contribution to the literature the first reason is that by using trade by trade futures prices we can make more realistic assumptions about the pnces at which trades could have taken place this paper uses intra day prices to examine efficiency prior studies at best used closing prices to examine apparent inefficiencies and assumed that transactions took place at these closing prices there are two problems with this procedure first simultaneous transactions cannot actually occur at closing prices there is almost an hour difference between the closing of the chicago futures and new york spot markets thus when the closing spot market price is observed the futures market has been closed for about an hour closing prices could be used to judge apparent discrepancies however it would be necessary to execute trades at the open making decisions based on closing prices and then assuming trades can take place at these prices is an approximation which could significantly affect results in addition using only closing prices ignores any intra day trades which could lead to profits in this study we match in time intra day prices in the spot and futures market these matched prices are used to identify apparently profitable trading rules we then assume trades take place at prices which are observed later in the day this is a test of a trading rule which an investor could actually follow as we discuss later in the paper our results differ from prior studies these differences are primarily due to using intra day prices and carefully matching times so that information used to initiate trades would actually be available to the investor at the time of the trade the second reason is that we examine more complex trading strategies than those which have been employed in other studies the random walk literature provides a useful analogy the original random walk studies simply correlated past and future prices or returns later studies examined filter rules and other more complicated trading rules in this study we employ alternative trading rules of increased complexity to test for the existence of trading profits finally we explicitly examine the consequence of t bills futures contracts being futures rather than forward contracts futures contracts unlike forward contracts involve flows every settlement day the intermediate cash flows on futures contracts can affect the profitability of any strategy the only prior study that even considered this effect is the one by rendleman and carabini 1979 they used the theoretical model of cox ingersoll and ross 1981 to try to estimate whether the difference between forward and futures prices was likely to be large enough to affect the payoff from alternative trading strategies this is a useful first attempt however ultimately the effect of daily settlement or marking to the market has to be examined directly as part of trading strategies to see if it affects the outcome of these strategies there are other problems with prior studies these involve gross estimates of prices and averaging data in a way that can mask inefficiencies since these problems are discussed in some detail in rendleman and carabini there is no reason to review them further here probably no area in finance has received more attention than the efficiency literature the reader may well wonder why even given the approximareceived for publication august 23 1982 revision accepted for publication may 20 1983 new york university new york university and baruch college respectively the authors would like to thank the center for the study of futures markets at columbia business school for financial support

innovations new market instruments any measure of the volume of financial innovation would register an explosion in the last ten years for example the swap market has grown from zero to hundreds of billions of dollars in this period the number of traded financial futures contracts has increased from a handful to nearly one hundred the explosion is one of both scale and variety even the british government now issues gilts with non standard coupon rates and conversion features apparently tailored to a whole range of specialised clienteles

no arbitrage conditions for storable commodities and the modeling of futures term structures abstract one distinguishable feature of storable commodities is that they relate to two markets cash market and storage market this paper proves that if no arbitrage exists in the storage cash dual markets the commodity convenience yield has to be non negative however classical reduced form models for futures term structures could allow serious arbitrages due to the high volatility of the convenience yield to avoid negative convenience yield this paper proposes a semi affine arbitrage free model which prices futures analytically and fits futures term structures reasonably well importantly our model prices commodity related contingent claims such as calendar spread options quite differently with classical models

default market microstructure and changing trade patterns in forward markets a case study of north sea oil abstract default or credit risk is a central difference between forward and futures markets empirical tests have found little difference between forwards and futures prices but these tests have been conducted on markets where such risk is minimal e g foreign exchange so that even if default risk is in general an important difference between forward and futures trading they would have been unable to detect its effects in contrast this paper presents a case study of a market for forward delivery of a type of crude oil from the north sea that experienced widespread and well documented defaults when the spot price of the underlying commodity plunged from roughly 30 to roughly 10 per barrel in a short period of time in early 1986 the defaults were by relatively small lightly capitalized trading companies firms that neither produce nor consume the physical commodity because information on defaults in financial markets is scarce the paper describes the circumstances surrounding the default episode in some detail the market survived the default episode with market microstructure unaltered and still flourishes despite the successful introduction of a futures market in the same commodity by the london international petroleum exchange patterns of trade changed however the paper examines the hypothesis that investment banks which entered the market following the default period provided intermediation services to market participants thereby substituting to an extent for a clearinghouse taking advantage of the information on the buyer and seller in each transaction the paper presents nonparametric tests for changing patterns of forward trade

index futures arbitrage and the behavior of stock index futures prices this article examines intraday transaction datafor s p 500 stock indexfutures prices and the intraday quotes for the underlying index the data indicate that thefutures price changes are uncorrelated and that the variability of these price changes exceeds the variability ofprice changes in the s p 500 index this excess variability of the futures over the index remains even after controlling for the nonsynchronous prices in the index quotes which induces autocorrelation in the index changes we advance and examine empirically two hypotheses regarding the difference between the futures price and its theoretical value that this mispricing increases on average with maturity and that it is path dependent evidence supporting these hypotheses is presented

dynamic asset pricing with non redundant forwards abstract in an incomplete market in which non redundant forward contracts contribute to span the uncertainty some standard results of portfolio theory must be amended when the investment opportunity set is driven by k state variables a k 3 mutual fund separation theorem is obtained in lieu of merton s k 2 fund separation result the additional fund is a portfolio that hedges the interest rate risk brought about by the optimal portfolio strategy itself second the mean variance efficiency of the market portfolio of cash assets is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the linear relationship between expected return and beta to hold third the pricing equation for a forward contract is shown to contain an extra term relative to that for a cash asset term we name strategy risk premium

regulation regulatory lag and the use of futures markets this study explores the feasibility of using futures markets to mitigate the eroding effects of regulatory lag on a public utility s revenue stream by the very nature of the regulatory process shareholders of public utilities are exposed to substantial risks due to unanticipated economic fluctuations since the rates allowed by public utility commissions presumably reflect the anticipated costs of service at least in forward test year jurisdictions to the extent that the cash flow components which constitute a public utility s revenue requirements are not correctly anticipated and that new information affecting utility costs and revenues becomes mirrored in futures prices trading in futures markets can offset the unexpected changes in the costs of service despite the deleterious effects of regulatory lag on a utility s earnings no uniform policy exists to prevent the erosion of earnings due to unanticipated economic events and inevitable delays in processing applications for rate increases stopgap palliative measures have surfaced in some jurisdictions including emergency rate increases bonded rate increases adoption of transition loss allowances automatic adjustment mechanisms such as fuel adjustment clauses and adoption of a forward test year but none offers the same potential for the efficient risk bearing that futures markets offer the use of futures markets to alleviate regulatory lag offers a potential for lowering regulatory risk thereby reducing investor return requirements and hence output prices borne by consumers the paper is organized as follows section i presents a brief overview of the regulatory process and discusses the effect regulatory lag has on the public utility s revenues section ii develops strategies for hedging the expected revenue requirements against the effects of unanticipated price movements in several factor inputs specifically risk control techniques are explored for three inflation sensitive components of revenue requirements the cost of incremental debt labor costs and materials costs as section iii shows the use of futures markets by utilities themselves or as part of the rate setting process has consequences for issues of social welfare the use of futures markets in a regulated industry raises important questions of efficient risk bearing the allocation of gains and losses between firms and the public and managerial incentives finally section iv provides a summary of the paper s issues and findings

pricing of long dated commodity derivatives do stochastic interest rates matter abstract does modelling stochastic interest rates beyond stochastic volatility improve pricing performance on long dated commodity derivatives to answer this question we consider futures price models for commodity derivatives that allow for stochastic volatility and stochastic interest rates and a correlation structure between the underlying variables we examine the empirical pricing performance of these models on pricing long dated crude oil derivatives estimating the model parameters from historical crude oil futures prices and option prices we find that stochastic interest rate models improve pricing performance on long dated crude oil derivatives when the interest rate volatility is relatively high furthermore increasing the model dimensionality does not tend to improve the pricing performance on long dated crude oil option prices but it matters for long dated futures prices we also find empirical evidence for a negative correlation between crude oil futures prices and interest rates that contributes to improving fit to long dated crude oil option prices

assessing energy supply security outage costs in private households abstract the objective of this paper is to contribute to the topic of energy supply security by proposing a monte carlo based and a survey based model to analyze the costs of power interruptions outage cost estimations are particularly important when deciding on investments to improve supply security e g additional transmission lines in order to compare costs to benefits but also other policy decisions on measures that have direct or indirect consequences for the supply security e g a phasing out of nuclear energy need to be based on results from outage cost estimations the main focus of this paper lies with residential consumers but the model is applied to commercial industrial and governmental consumers as well there are limited studies that have approached the problem of evaluating outage cost when comparing the results of these studies they often display a high degree of diversification as consumers have different needs and dependencies towards the supply of electricity because of varying circumstances and preferences a great diversity in outage cost is a logical consequence to take the high degree of uncertainties into account a monte carlo simulation was conducted in this study for the case of private households in germany

taxes and the futures forward price difference in the 91 day t bill market this paper investigates a tax based explanation for the futures forward price divergence in the ninety one day t bill the explanation is firstly in terms of the distinction between capital gains and losses and ordinary gains and losses and secondly in terms of investors to whom the above distinction applies and investors such as broker dealers to whom it does not the empirical results are encouraging though more ambiguous in the post 1981 period overall it would seem that other factors in addition to taxes are also at work copyright 1989 by ohio state university press

taxable and tax deferred investing a tax arbitrage approach we analyze an intertemporal portfolio problem with both taxable and tax deferred retirement accounts using a tax arbitrage argument we identify conditions under which the optimal location decision where to place an asset is separable from the allocation decision how much to allocate to each asset investors place highly taxed assets in the tax deferred account to maximize the tax benefit and adjust their taxable portfolios to achieve the optimal risk exposure we show that the two account problem can be reduced to a taxable account only problem the results are robust to capital gains tax deferrals consumption and contribution decisions and stochastic tax rates

an empirical analysis of implicit delivery options in the treasury bond futures contract abstract assuming perfect frictionless and efficient markets this paper develops a framework to estimate the composite value of the quality wild card and end of month options implicit in the t bond futures contract the value of delivery options is shown to be the excess of forward price of the cheapest bond over its conversion factor times the exercise price of futures contract empirical results indicate that the option values over the last quarter of the nearby contract are on average less than 0 5 percent of the mean futures price which is substantially lower than the value reported by previous studies further scrutiny reveals that although the empirical estimates are contaminated by non synchronous bond data they are consistent with certain known theoretical properties of option values

exact solutions for futures and european futures options on pure discount bonds this paper provides closed form solutions for futures and european futures options on pure discount bonds under the ornstein uhlenbeck normal process a significant difference between black s model 1976 and the model in this paper for futures options is discussed

continuous time methods in finance a review and an assessment i survey and assess the development of continuous time methods in finance during the last 30 years the subperiod 1969 to 1980 saw a dizzying pace of development with seminal ideas in derivatives securities pricing term structure theory asset pricing and optimal consumption and portfolio choices during the period 1981 to 1999 the theory has been extended and modified to better explain empirical regularities in various subfields of finance this latter subperiod has seen significant progress in econometric theory computational and estimation methods to test and implement continuous time models capital market frictions and bargaining issues are being increasingly incorporated in continuous time theory the roots of modern continuous time methods in finance can be traced back to the seminal contributions of merton 1969 1971 1973b in the late 1960s and early 1970s merton 1969 pioneered the use of continuous time modeling in financial economics by formulating the intertemporal consumption and portfolio choice problem of an investor in a stochastic dynamic programming setting merton 1973b also showed how such a framework can be used to develop equilibrium asset pricing implications thereby significantly extending the asset pricing theory to richer dynamic settings and expanding the scope of applications of continuous time methods to study problems in financial economics 1 within a span of about 30 years from the publication of merton s inf luential papers continuous time methods have become an integral part of financial economics indeed in certain core areas in finance such as e g asset pricing derivatives valuation term structure theory and portfolio selection continuoustime methods have proved to be the most attractive way to conduct research and gain economic intuition the continuous time approach in these areas has produced models with a rich variety of testable implications the econometric theory for testing continuous time models has made rapid strides in the last decade and has thus kept pace with the impressive progress on the theoretical front one hopes that the actual empirical investigations and estimation using the new procedures will follow suit soon

the effect of capital structure on a firm s liquidation decision abstract a firm s liquidation can impose costs on its customers workers and suppliers an agency relationship between these individuals and the firm exists in that the liquidation decision controlled by the firm as the agent affects other individuals the customers workers and suppliers as principals the analysis in this paper suggests that capital structure can control the incentive conflict problem of this relationship by serving as a pre positioning or bonding mechanism appropriate selection of capital structure assures that incentives are aligned so that the firm implements the ex ante value maximizing liquidation policy

general equilibrium stock index futures prices theory and empirical evidence we develop a closed form general equilibrium model of stock index futures prices in a continuous time economy with stochastic interest rates and market volatility we show that futures prices implied by the model have very different properties from those of the cost of carry model using nyse stock index futures data we examine the restrictions imposed on futures prices by both the equilibrium and cost of carry models consistent with the equilibrium model we find that stock index futures prices are related to market volatility and that their interest rate sensitivity is a nonlinear function of contract maturity

possible sources of wage divergence among metropolitan areas of the united states much of the literature on sub national income convergence relates to states and regions this paper focuses upon metropolitan areas as the germane geographical units for studying income convergence evidence of metropolitan wage divergence the opposite of convergence is presented a theoretical basis for wage divergence is found in endogenous growth models and in two sector trade models cross section regression equations are estimated in which the level and the growth of metropolitan wages are related to variables that the empirical evidence and the theory suggest may be important sources of wage divergence

measuring the economic value of demand side and supply resources in integrated resource planning models when comparing the economics of alternative portfolios of supply and demand side resources utility planners should consider not only costs but also effects upon the benefits or value that electricity consumers receive a method for including such effects in comprehensive resource planning models is presented this method considers the value impacts of electric rate changes takeback of energy savings in conservation programs and increases in energy services provided by load building or valley filling programs in general the method rewards resource portfolios that cause rates to move closer to marginal cost or increase the energy services provided applications of a net value objective in several resource planning models are summarized they confirm that optimizing net value can yield different resource portfolios than minimizing cost

currency option pricing with mean reversion and uncovered interest parity a revision of the garman kohlhagen model abstract we consider a model for the pricing of currency options where the logarithm of the exchange rate exhibits mean reversion i e follows the omstein uhlenbeck process we mention reasons why exchange rates could exhibit mean reversion the domestic and foreign short interest rates are related to the logarithm of the exchange rate through uncovered interest parity under these assumptions we derive formulas for the value of a european currency option from the point of view of both domestic and foreign investors we also derive formulas for options on forward and futures contracts we compare option values computed by means of the garman kohlhagen model with corresponding results from our model it appears that our model cannot explain all instances of mispricing of currency options by the garman kohlhagen model which have been reported by previous authors the main virtue of our paper however is that we derive a simple model which incorporates clear theoretical relationship between the exchange rate and the domestic and foreign interest rates

the interruption of income convergence and income growth in large cities in the 1980s recent studies have documented the divergence of per capita personal income among regions of the us in the 1980s following many decades of income convergence this paper establishes the same patter

market interactions in returns and volatilities between spot and forward shipping freight markets abstract the lead lag relationship in both returns and volatilities between spot and futures markets has been investigated extensively in the financial economics literature only a limited number of such studies have appeared on forward markets primarily due to the lack of easy access to empirical data this paper uses a unique database in over the counter forward freight agreements ffa to investigate the issue the underlying commodity is non storable being that of a shipping service with the additional feature of transactions costs being higher in the spot market in comparison to the forward market these features have interesting implications for the markets at the practical level the better understanding of the mean and variance dynamics can improve risk management and budget planning decisions

the wider impacts of high technology employment evidence from u s cities abstract innovative high technology industries are commonly described as drivers of regional development tech workers earn high wages but they are also said to generate knock on effects throughout the local economies that host them spurring growth in jobs and wages in nontradable activities at the same time in iconic high tech agglomerations like the san francisco bay area the home of silicon valley the success of the tech industry creates tensions in part as living costs rise beyond the reach of many non tech workers across a large sample of u s cities this paper explores these issues systematically combining annual data on wages employment and prices from the quarterly census of employment and wages the department of housing and urban development and the consumer price index it estimates how growth in tradable tech employment affects the real living cost deflated wages of local workers in nontradable sectors results indicate that high technology employment has significant positive but modest effects on the real wages of workers in nontradable sectors these effects appear to be spread consistently across different kinds of nontradable activities in terms of substantive wider impacts tech appears benign though fairly ineffectual

a comparison of forward and futures prices of an interest rate sensitive financial asset this paper focuses on contractual distinctions as an explanation for the price divergence between futures and forward contracts specifically it investigates the effect of marking to market on the observed price differences using the pricing model described in cox ingersoll and ross cir 1981 journal of financial economics 9 321 346 using previously unavailable data this paper employs eurodollars an interest rate sensitive financial asset to test the cir model unlike prior empirical studies test results support both the weak prediction concerning the sign of the average price difference and the stronger prediction that specific covariances explain the variation in the price differences futures contracts and forward contracts are fundamentally similar both contracts are agreements between two parties to trade a specific good or asset at a future date at a price determined today these agreements facilitate the transfer of risk between contracting parties permitting the creation of hedging strategies in spite of their conceptual similarity the implementation of these two contracts is quite different participants in futures markets trade highly standardized contracts by open outcry on organized exchanges clearing associations tor the exchanges control default risk by assuming the opposite side of each transaction guaranteeing payment to reduce traders incentive to default the exchanges mark positions to market by settling contract gains and losses daily in contrast to the futures market the market for forward contracts is mostly an over the counter market in the absence of a clearinghouse trader reputation helps control default risk unlike futures contracts no markingto market occurs the parties in the contract make no payments until maturity of the contract the forward market for financial interest rate instruments departs even further from the futures market format a trader can use the cash market for interest rate instruments to establish a forward position for example a trader can secure a forward position for a three month t bill beginning three months in the future by buying a t bill with a six month maturity and selling a t bill with a three month maturity

taxes and the pricing of stock index futures stock index futures prices are generally below the level predicted by simple arbitrage models this paper suggests that the discrepancy between the actual and predicted prices is caused by taxes capital gains and losses are not taxed until they are realized as constantinides demonstrates in a recent paper this gives stockholders a valuable timing option if the stock price drops the investor can pass part of the loss on to the government by selling the stock on the other hand if the stock price rises the investor can postpone the tax by not realizing the gain since this option is not available to stock index futures traders the futures prices will be lower than standard no tax models predict on 24 february 1982 the kansas city board of trade began trading futures contracts on the value line average stock index during the next two months both the chicago mercantile exchange and the new york futures exchange also initiated trading in stock index futures although these contracts are actively traded their prices have puzzled both practitioners and academics the observed

new techniques to extract market expectations from financial instruments this paper is a selective survey of new or recent methods to extract information about market expectations from asset prices for monetary policy purposes traditionally interest rates and forward exchange rates have been used to extract expected means of future interest rates exchange rates and inflation more recently these methods have been refined to rely on implied forward interest rates so as to extract expected future time paths very recently methods have been designed to extract not only the means but the whole risk neutral probability distribution from a set of option prices

effects of insider trading disclosures on speculative activity and future prices this paper explores a simple model of the effects of requiring a public disclosure of insider trader activity in future markets

pricing interest rate options in a two factor cox ingersoll ross model of the term structure solutions are presented for prices on interest rate options in a two factor version of the cox ingersoll ross model of the term structure specific solutions are developed for caps on floating interest rates and for european options on discount bonds coupon bonds coupon bond futures and euro dollar futures the solutions for the options are expressed as multivariate integrals and we show how to reduce the calculations to univariate numerical integrations which can be calculated very quickly the two factor model provides more flexibility in fitting observed term structures and the fixed parameters of the model can be set to capture the variability of the term structure over time article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

producing derivative assets with forward contracts this paper shows how a derivative security can be duplicated by a forward strategy and hence priced by arbitrage in terms ofthe forward price

a theory of price limits in futures markets abstract the existence of price limits in certain futures markets is explained by demonstrating that price limits may act as a partial substitute for margin requirements in ensuring contract performance their effectiveness is a decreasing function of the amount of information available to traders about the equilibrium futures price which is unobservable in the event of a limit move and the theory predicts that no limits will exist in the markets for financial futures actual limits are broadly consistent with the theory his interpretation plausible as it was was totally misleading with the dangerous verisimilitude of a theory which will fit all or nearly all the facts and yet more entirely miss the truth by a mere accident then would a frank perplexity heritage v sackville west