This book is a collection of original papers by Robert Jarrow that contributed to significant advances in financial economics. Divided into three parts, Part I concerns option pricing theory and its foundations. The papers here deal with the famous Black-Scholes-Merton model, characterizations of the American put option, and the first applications of arbitrage pricing theory to market manipulation and liquidity risk.Part II relates to pricing derivatives under stochastic interest rates. Included is the paper introducing the famous Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) model, together with papers on topics like the characterization of the difference between forward and futures prices, the forward price martingale measure, and applications of the HJM model to foreign currencies and commodities.Part III deals with the pricing of financial derivatives considering both stochastic interest rates and the likelihood of default. Papers cover the reduced form credit risk model, in particular the original Jarrow and Turnbull model, the Markov model for credit rating transitions, counterparty risk, and diversifiable default risk.

We model the demand-pressure effect on prices when options cannot be perfectly hedged. The model shows that demand pressure in one option contract increases its price by an amount proportional to the variance of the unhedgeable part of the option. Similarly, the demand pressure increases the price of any other option by an amount proportional to the covariance of their unhedgeable parts. Empirically, we identify aggregate positions of dealers and end users using a unique dataset, and show that demand-pressure effects help explain well-known option-pricing puzzles. First, end users are net long index options, especially out-of-money puts, which helps explain their apparent expensiveness and the smirk. Second, demand patterns help explain the prices of single-stock options.

Recent empirical studies find that once an option pricing model has incorporated stochastic volatility, allowing interest rates to be stochastic does not improve pricing or hedging any further while adding random jumps to the modeling framework only helps the pricing of extremely short-term options but not the hedging performance. Given that only options of relatively short terms are used in existing studies, this paper addresses two related questions: Do long-term options contain different information than short-term options? If so, can long-term options better differentiate among alternative models? Our inquiry starts by first demonstrating analytically that differences among alternative models usually do not surface when applied to short term options, but do so when applied to long-term contracts. For instance, within a wide parameter range, the Arrow-Debreu state price densities implicit in different stochastic-volatility models coincide almost everywhere at the short horizon, but diverge at the long horizon. Using regular options (of less than a year to expiration) and LEAPS, both written on the Samp;P 500 index, we find that short- and long-term contracts indeed contain different information and impose distinct hurdles on any candidate option pricing model. While the data suggest that it is not as important to model stochastic interest rates or random jumps (beyond stochastic volatility) for pricing LEAPS, incorporating stochastic interest rates can nonetheless enhance hedging performance in certain cases involving long-term contracts.