This paper proposes a closed form solution for pricing an American put option on a non-dividend paying stock. An American put option grants its holder rights, but not obligation to sell a stock in a fixed price at any time up until maturity. In the past decades, there is no closed form solution for pricing American options although many people made great efforts. In this paper, an optimally early exercise strategy of an American put option on a non-dividend paying stock is set up. That is, an American put option should be early-exercised when the maximum option premium of early exercise is no less than the value of its European counterpart; otherwise, it should not be early-exercised. Based on this strategy, a series of lemmas is proposed and a closed form formula is drawn. Also, this paper shows that Merton (1973)’s formula does not do a good job for pricing perpetual American put options and shows the price of a perpetual American put option on a non-dividend paying stock is equal to the strike price.

In this paper, we construct a new variance bound on any stochastic discount factor (SDF) of the form m = m(x), where x is a vector of random state variables. In contrast to the well known Hansen-Jagannathan bound that places a lower bound on the variance of m(x), our bound tightens it by a ratio of 1=½2x;m0 where ½x;m0 is the multiple correlation coefficient between x and the standard minimum variance SDF, m0. In many applications, the correlation is small, and hence our bound can be substantially tighter than Hansen-Jagannathan’s. For example, when x is the growth rate of consumption, based on Cochrane’s (2001) estimates of market volatility and ½x;m0 , the new bound is 25 times greater than the Hansen-Jagannathan bound, making it much more difficult to explain the equity-premium puzzle based on existing asset pricing models.

There are many factors that affect SMEs’ ability to borrow from bank. Based on facts and data about SMEs’ financing in Chengdu city, capital of Southwestern China’s Sichuan province, this paper is intended to investigate the factors affecting SMEs to borrow from bank by methods of empirical study. We find that whether SMEs can provide collateral or guarantee is a decisive factor, factors such as firm size, willingness to accept bank’s clauses, close relationship with bank play an important role. But in contrast to intuition, correlation analysis and regression result shows that SMEs’ financial variables such as income, net profit, asset-debt ratio and credit score is not obvious to affect their ability to get bank loan. Consistent with theory prediction and qualitative analysis, firm size is the most important factor to affect SMEs’ ability to borrow from bank. The regression results reflect information asymmetry between SMEs and banks, and that banks had taken a simple way to protect themselves.

We axiomatize a new class of multi-prior preferences for decision-making under uncertainty. The unique feature of this class of preferences is that it allows for the role of a reference probability measure. The class of preferences has a tractable representation. It takes the form of minimization, over a set of priors, of an expected utility plus a penalty function that penalizes deviation from the reference probability measure. The preference reduces to the standard expected utility when there is no uncertainty. The paper also discusses some potential applications of the axiomatized preferences.

We study stochastic linear-quadratic (LQ) optimal control problems over an infinite time horizon, allowing the cost matrices to be indefinite. We develop a systematic approach based on semidefinite programming (SDP). A central issue is the stability of the feedback control; and we show this can be effectively examined through the complementary duality of the SDP. Furthermore, we establish several implication relations among the SDP complementary duality, the (generalized) Riccati equation, and the optimality of the LQ control problem. Based on these relations, we propose a numerical procedure that provides a thorough treatment of the LQ control problem via primaldual SDP: it identifies a stabilizing feedback control that is optimal or determines that the problem possesses no optimal solution. For the latter case, we develop an
-approximation scheme that is asymptotically optimal.

We find that short-horizon institutions possess private information on long-term earnings that will be reflected in near term stock prices but do not have private information on long-term earnings that will be reflected in stock prices beyond the near term. In contrast, we find no evidence that long-horizon institutions have private information on long-term earnings, regardless of whether the private information will be reflected in near term stock prices or not. Our results question the notion that long-horizon institutions have a stronger incentive than short-horizon institutions to acquire private information on long-term firm value.

In this paper, we have examined the long memory property of Indian stock market by analyzing the trading volume series. Given the absence of trading volume index data, we have constructed trading volume series for the Indian stock market. We used maximum likelihood method to analyze the constructed trading volume index. The estimation of ARFIMA model, obtained a signicant parameter for the order of fractional integration, and this could be consistent with the long autocorrelations observed in the trading volume series. The ndings that stock trading volume is a long memory process is robust, given dierent estimating methods, different subsamples, temporal aggregation and tests on individual stocks. Because of the conditional heteroscedasticity in the series, we have also carried out ARFIMAGARCH procedures to check whether long persistence were robust in the presence of conditional heteroscedasticity.

The purposes of this research are to examine bank risk taking behavior and its relationship with bank charter value, particularly whether the responses of risk measures to charter value are different for banks with high and low level of charter value for the five European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK) during the period 1993-2002. By employing Galloway et al’s (1997) empirical model, the findings are partially consistent with their results. The consistency is the acceptance of the ‘moral hazard’ hypothesis that banks with low charter value are more apt to engage in high risk taking strategies. Further analyses found this behavior was constrained in the early 2000s. Moreover, it is interesting that the results also illustrate that risk taking increased with bank charter value over the period, which rejects the ‘bankruptcy cost’ hypothesis that when banks charters are valuable, they are more likely to be risk aversion due to the fear of potential losses of their valuable charters. Overall, the pooled data indicate that there is a non-linear relationship between risk taking behavior and bank charter value.

In a real options and game-theoretic framework, this paper examines the optimal R&D investment timing of an incumbent under uncertainty, which faces the threat of preemption by a potential entrant. We incorporate incomplete information into the model by assuming that the incumbent does not know the entrant’s investment timing but know its distribution. We find that incomplete information reduces the erosion of waiting option value by the competition, and therefore waiting is still valuable even in the presence of preemption and competition. The entrant's hazard rate has the impact on the incumbent's optimal investment timing: the more the hazard rate is, the earlier the incumbent invests.

Based on the research of foreign capital flows and financial risks, this note puts forward the conceptual model─“Foreign Capital Reliance”(FCR), and analyses its interior development mechanism and the possibility & inevitability of its result in Financial Crisis from the perspective of monetary capital. The author believes that financial risks also exist in foreign capital flows, and foreign capital inflows are entirely possible to result in a more fragile economic system. The author also regards Asian Financial Crisis as Crisis typical of FCR. The empirical analyses of sampling five Asian countries: Thailand, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Philippines support the arguments.