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This thesis consists of three essays which study the valuation of options in an equilibrium framework. The first essay uses a general equilibrium model to study the valuation of options on the market portfolio with predictable returns and stochastic volatility in a complete market. In a closed endowment economy where aggregate dividend is the only source of uncertainty, I investigate why the stock return exhibits certain predictable features. I also examine the equilibrium relationship between the price of the market portfolio and its volatility, as well as the relationship between the spot interest rate and the market volatility. Equilibrium conditions imply that the predictable feature of the market portfolio is induced by the mean-reverting of the rate of dividend growth. It is shown that there is strong interdependence between the stock price process and its volatility process. Using the Euler equation, I derive equilibrium pricing formulas for options on the market portfolio which incorporate both stochastic volatility and stochastic interest rates. Since there is only one source of uncertainty, this model preserves the completeness feature for hedging and risk management purposes. With realistic parameter values, numerical examples show that stochastic volatility and stochastic interest rates are both necessary for correcting the Black-Scholes pricing biases. The second essay focuses on the currency options in an incomplete market where the economy is subject to shocks in aggregate dividend and money supply. The key feature is that the exchange rate exhibits systematic jump risks which should be priced in the currency options. The closed-endowment equilibrium model in the first essay is extended to a small open monetary economy with stochastic jump-diffusion processes for both the money supply and aggregate dividend. It is shown that the exchange rate is affected by both government monetary policies and aggregate dividends. Since the jump in the exchange rate is correlated with aggregate consumption, the jump risk in the exchange rate derived from aggregate consumption must be priced by means of utility maximization. I further derive the foreign agents' risk-neutral valuation of the European currency option and provide restrictions that ensure the law of one price in currency option pricing. In general, these restrictions depend on the agent's risk preference. The objective of the third essay is to empirically study the existence of systematic jump risks in exchange rates and analyze their importance for currency option pricing. The empirical study is based on the theoretical model studied in the second essay, which argues that exchange rates are inherently correlated with the market and so must exhibit systematic jump risks. The third essay uses the maximum-likelihood method to estimate the joint distribution of exchange rates and the price of the market portfolio. Empirical results show that it is important to incorporate both systematic and non-systematic jump components in exchange rates in order to correctly price currency options.
This book mainly addresses the general equilibrium asset pricing method in two aspects: option pricing and variance risk premium. First, volatility smile and smirk is the famous puzzle in option pricing. Different from no arbitrage method, this book applies the general equilibrium approach in explaining the puzzle. In the presence of jump, investors impose more weights on the jump risk than the volatility risk, and as a result, investors require more jump risk premium which generates a pronounced volatility smirk. Second, based on the general equilibrium framework, this book proposes variance risk premium and empirically tests its predictive power for international stock market returns.
The first essay investigates the option-implied investor preferences by comparing equilibrium option pricing models under jump-diffusion to option bounds extracted from discrete-time stochastic dominance (SD). We show that the bounds converge to two prices that define an interval comparable to the observed option bid-ask spreads for S&P 500 index options. Further, the bounds' implied distributions exhibit tail risk comparable to that of the return data and thus shed light on the dark matter of the divergence between option-implied and underlying tail risks. Moreover, the bounds can better accommodate reasonable values of the ex-dividend expected excess return than the equilibrium models' prices. We examine the relative risk aversion coefficients compatible with the boundary distributions extracted from index return data. We find that the SD-restricted range of admissible RRA values is consistent with the macro-finance studies of the equity premium puzzle and with several anomalous results that have appeared in earlier option market studies.The second essay examines theoretically and empirically a two-factor stochastic volatility model. We adopt an affine two-factor stochastic volatility model, where aggregate market volatility is decomposed into two independent factors; a persistent factor and a transient factor. We introduce a pricing kernel that links the physical and risk neutral distributions, where investor's equity risk preference is distinguished from her variance risk preference. Using simultaneous data from the S&P 500 index and options markets, we find a consistent set of parameters that characterizes the index dynamics under physical and risk-neutral distributions. We show that the proposed decomposition of variance factors can be characterized by a different persistence and different sensitivity of the variance factors to the volatility shocks. We obtain negative prices for both variance factors, implying that investors are willing to pay for insurance against increases in volatility risk, even if those increases have little persistence. We also obtain negative correlations between shocks to the market returns and each volatility factor, where correlation is less significant in transient factor and therefore has a less significant effect on the index skewness. Our empirical results indicate that unlike stochastic volatility model, join restrictions do not lead to the poor performance of two-factor SV model, measured by Vega-weighted root mean squared errors.In the third essay, we develop a closed-form equity option valuation model where equity returns are related to market returns with two distinct systematic components; one of which captures transient variations in returns and the other one captures persistent variations in returns. Our proposed factor structure and closed-form option pricing equations yield separate expressions for the exposure of equity options to both volatility components and overall market returns. These expressions allow a portfolio manager to hedge her portfolio's exposure to the underlying risk factors. In cross-sectional analysis our model predicts that firms with higher transient beta have a steeper term structure of implied volatility and a steeper implied volatility moneyness slope. Our model also predicts that variances risk premiums have more significant effect on the equity option skew when the transient beta is higher. On the empirical front, for the firms listed on the Dow Jones index, our model provides a good fit to the observed equity option prices.
The current world financial scene indicates at an intertwined and interdependent relationship between financial market activity and economic health. This book explains how the economic messages delivered by the dynamic evolution of financial asset returns are strongly related to option prices. The Black Scholes framework is introduced and by underlining its shortcomings, an alternative approach is presented that has emerged over the past ten years of academic research, an approach that is much more grounded on a realistic statistical analysis of data rather than on ad hoc tractable continuous time option pricing models. The reader then learns what it takes to understand and implement these option pricing models based on time series analysis in a self-contained way. The discussion covers modeling choices available to the quantitative analyst, as well as the tools to decide upon a particular model based on the historical datasets of financial returns. The reader is then guided into numerical deduction of option prices from these models and illustrations with real examples are used to reflect the accuracy of the approach using datasets of options on equity indices.
The first edition of Theory of Valuation is a collection of important papers in the field of theoretical financial economics published from 1973 to 1986, and original accompanying essays contributed by eminent researchers including Robert C Merton, Edward C Prescott, Stephen A Ross, and Joseph E Stiglitz. Since then, with the perspective of major theoretical strides in the field, the book has more than fulfilled its original expectations. The realization that it remains today a compendium of classic articles and a must-read for any serious student in theoretical financial economics, has prompted the publication of a new edition. This second edition presents a summary statement of significant research in theoretical financial economics for both the specialist and non-specialist financial economist. It also provides material for PhD-level courses covering valuation theory, and elective reading for advanced MasterOCOs and undergraduate courses. In addition to reproducing the original contributions, this edition includes the seminal paper by Edward C Prescott and Rajnish Mehra, OC Recursive Competitive Equilibrium: The Case of Homogeneous Households, OCO originally published in Econometrica in 1980."