Mathematics and Financial Economics

This paper presents a continuous-time model of intraday trading, pricing, and liquidity with dynamic TWAP and VWAP benchmarks. The model is solved in closed-form for the competitive equilibrium and also for non-price-taking equilibria. The intraday trajectories of TWAP trading targets cause predictable intraday patterns of price pressure, and randomness in VWAP target trajectories induces additional randomness in intraday price-pressure patterns. TWAP and VWAP trading both reduce market liquidity and increase price volatility relative to just terminal trading targets alone. The model is computationally tractable, which lets us provide a number of numerical illustrations.

An important parameter describing the state of capital markets, investment opportunity sets, and asset pricing is the unobservable market risk price. The estimated risk price depends upon the selected asset set, the number of assets, the investment horizon, and the sample period. We document the large theoretical and empirical probability of an unacceptably negative sample estimate for the unbiased estimator of the squared risk price. We address admissibility and dominance under quadratic loss of alternative estimators, concluding that an optimized shrinkage estimator has the smallest expected quadratic loss compared with our alternative estimators. Using market data, we examine estimates for more inclusive investment opportunity sets and provide upper bounded estimates of the risk price and resultant unique Sharpe measure, to complement the existing literature’s Sharpe measure bounds and equity premium estimates. Finally, we examine time series properties, behavior in the business cycle, and relation to some recently advocated economic factors.

We construct shock elasticities that are pricing counterparts to impulse response functions. Recall that impulse response functions measure the importance of next-period shocks for future values of a time series. Shock elasticities measure the contributions to the price and to the expected future cash flow from changes in the exposure to a shock in the next period. They are elasticities because their measurements compute proportionate changes. We show a particularly close link between these objects in environments with Brownian information structures.

We study Merton’s portfolio optimization problem in a limit order market. An investor trading in a limit order market has the choice between market orders that allow immediate transactions and limit orders that trade at more favorable prices but are executed only when another market participant places a corresponding market order. Assuming Poisson arrivals of market orders from other traders we use a shadow price approach, similar to Kallsen and Muhle-Karbe (Ann Appl Probab, forthcoming) for models with proportional transaction costs, to show that the optimal strategy consists of using market orders to keep the proportion of wealth invested in the risky asset within certain boundaries, similar to the result for proportional transaction costs, while within these boundaries limit orders are used to profit from the bid–ask spread. Although the given best-bid and best-ask price processes are geometric Brownian motions the resulting shadow price process possesses jumps.

We examine international asset allocation with jump-diffusion assets in the presence of risky deviations of exchanges rates from purchasing power parity when investors consume both traded and nontraded goods. We show that adding new jump risks to existing diffusion assets does not alter investors’ original optimal portfolios of diffusion assets, as long as diffusion-risk premia remain unchanged. We also show that hedge portfolios against purchasing power parity deviations are integral parts of optimal portfolios for investors from different countries, and they can be constructed by using foreign and domestic inflation-indexed bonds. Moreover, country-specific demand for risky assets can arise from nontraded-good-specific inflation-rate-differential risks.

This paper presents a generic probabilistic approach to study elasticities and sensitivities of financial quantities under stochastic volatility models. We describe the shock elasticity, the quantile sensitivity and the vega value of cash flows with respect to perturbation of the volatility function of the model. The main contribution is to establish explicit formulae for these elasticities and sensitivities based on a novel application of the exponential measure change technique in Palmowski and Rolski (Bernoulli 8(6):767–785 2002). We carry out explicit calculations for the Heston model and the 3/2 stochastic volatility model, and derive explicit expressions in terms of model parameters.

In this article, we characterize efficient portfolios, i.e. portfolios which are optimal for at least one rational agent, in a very general multi-currency financial market model with proportional transaction costs. In our setting, transaction costs may be random, time-dependent, have jumps and the preferences of the agents are modeled by multivariate expected utility functions. We provide a complete characterization of efficient portfolios, generalizing earlier results of Dybvig (Rev Financ Stud 1:67–88, 1988) and Jouini and Kallal (J Econ Theory 66: 178–197, 1995). We basically show that a portfolio is efficient if and only if it is cyclically anticomonotonic with respect to at least one consistent price system that prices it. Finally, we introduce the notion of utility price of a given contingent claim as the minimal amount of a given initial portfolio allowing any agent to reach the claim by trading, and give a dual representation of it as the largest proportion of the market price necessary for all agents to reach the same expected utility level.

This paper investigates the orderings of gambles with well-defined means and variances that belong to the same location-scale family under: (i) the index of riskiness analyzed by Aumann and Serrano (AS) and (ii) the measure of riskiness proposed by Foster and Hart (FH). For both measures we study the characteristics and properties of the representation on the (mean, variance) plane of the curves that include gambles with the same level of riskiness. Our analysis applies to gambles with truncated normal distributions and beta distributions. We also discuss the relationships between different riskiness measures derived from the AS and FH measures.