In 2019, MIT hosted a 75th birthday symposium in honor of Robert C. Merton. The event included presentations by students and colleagues explaining the influence Merton has had on the profession and on their ideas. Each presenter focused on a specific aspect of Merton’s life and contributions so that the audience could gain a full picture of Merton’s influence while avoiding repetition across presentations. The brief contains edited transcripts of some of the speeches and panel discussions that took place at the symposium. The presentations cover Merton’s career, highlighting both his foundational work on continuous time finance and the functional approach to understanding organizations as well as recent work on retirement security and trust. Some of the presentations unveil new aspects of his life. Merton’s father, Robert K. Merton, was one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century, being the originator of concepts such as role model, unanticipated consequences, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Another of the presentations makes a convincing case for Merton as the first financial engineer; the presenter argues that a body of knowledge becomes a science when a field of engineering emerges from it. If that is the case, this brief achieves two goals. It celebrates the influence of Merton on the theory and practice of finance through a series of engaging presentations, and it traces the birth of finance as a science on its own.

The first volume of edited papers from the Tenth World Congress of the Econometric Society 2010.

Theories of Liquidity surveys the theoretical literature on market liquidity focusing on six main imperfections studied in that literature: participation costs, transaction costs, asymmetric information, imperfect competition, funding constraints, and search. The authors address three basic questions in the context of each imperfection: (a) how to measure illiquidity, i.e., the lack of liquidity, (b) how illiquidity relates to underlying market imperfections and other asset characteristics, and (c) how illiquidity affects expected asset returns. The theoretical literature on market liquidity often employs different modeling assumptions when studying different imperfections. Instead of surveying this literature in a descriptive manner, Theories of Liquidity uses a common, unified model to study all six imperfections that are considered, and for each imperfection addresses the three basic questions within that model. The model generates many of the key results shown in the literature. It also serves as a point of reference for surveying other results derived in different or more complicated settings, and for describing fruitful areas for future research.This survey is related to both market microstructure and asset pricing. It emphasizes fundamental market imperfections covered in the market microstructure literature, and examines how these relate to empirical measures of illiquidity used in that literature. It also examines how market imperfections affect expected asset returns - an asset-pricing exercise - and, in that sense, connects the two areas of research.

A study of asset price bubbles and the implications for preventing financial instability.

Asset pricing theory yields deep insights into crucial market phenomena such as stock market bubbles. Now in a newly revised and updated edition, this textbook guides the reader through this theory and its applications to markets. The new edition features ​new results on state dependent preferences, a characterization of market efficiency and a more general presentation of multiple-factor models using only the assumptions of no arbitrage and no dominance. Taking an innovative approach based on martingales, the book presents advanced techniques of mathematical finance in a business and economics context, covering a range of relevant topics such as derivatives pricing and hedging, systematic risk, portfolio optimization, market efficiency, and equilibrium pricing models. For applications to high dimensional statistics and machine learning, new multi-factor models are given. This new edition integrates suicide trading strategies into the understanding of asset price bubbles, greatly enriching the overall presentation and further strengthening the book’s underlying theme of economic bubbles. Written by a leading expert in risk management, Continuous-Time Asset Pricing Theory is the first textbook on asset pricing theory with a martingale approach. Based on the author’s extensive teaching and research experience on the topic, it is particularly well suited for graduate students in business and economics with a strong mathematical background.

The book presents models for the pricing of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, and options. The models are formulated and analyzed using concepts and techniques from mathematics and probability theory. It presents important classic models and some recent 'state-of-the-art' models that outperform the classics.

The Handbook on Systemic Risk, written by experts in the field, provides researchers with an introduction to the multifaceted aspects of systemic risks facing the global financial markets. The Handbook explores the multidisciplinary approaches to analyzing this risk, the data requirements for further research, and the recommendations being made to avert financial crisis. The Handbook is designed to encourage new researchers to investigate a topic with immense societal implications as well as to provide, for those already actively involved within their own academic discipline, an introduction to the research being undertaken in other disciplines. Each chapter in the Handbook will provide researchers with a superior introduction to the field and with references to more advanced research articles. It is the hope of the editors that this Handbook will stimulate greater interdisciplinary academic research on the critically important topic of systemic risk in the global financial markets.