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.

This monograph studies multi-member households or, more generally, socio-economic groups from a purely theoretical perspective and within a general equilibrium framework, in contrast to a sizeable empirical literature. The approach is based on the belief that households, their composition, decisions and behavior within a competitive market economy deserve thorough examination. The authors set out to link the formation, composition, decision-making, and stability of households. They develop general equilibrium models of pure exchange economies in which households can have several, typically heterogeneous members and act as collective decision-making units on the one hand and as competitive market participants on the other hand. Moreover, the more advanced models combine traditional exchange (markets for commodities) and matching (markets for people or partners) and develop implications for welfare, social structures, and economic policy. In the field of family economics, Hans Haller and Hans Gersbach have pioneered a ‘market’ approach that applies the tools of general equilibrium theory to the analysis of household behavior. This very interesting book presents an overview of their methods and results. This is an inspiring work. Pierre-André Chiappori, Columbia University, USA The sophisticated, insightful and challenging analysis presented in this book extends the theory of the multi-person household along an important but relatively neglected dimension, that of general equilibrium theory. It also challenges GE theorists themselves to follow Paul Samuelson in taking seriously the real attributes of that fundamental building block, the household, as a social group whose decisions may not satisfy the standard axioms of individual choice. This synthesis and extension of their earlier work by Gersbach and Haller will prove to be a seminal contribution in its field. Ray Rees, LMU Munich, Germany

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 provides a broad introduction of modern asset pricing theory with equal treatments for both discrete-time and continuous-time modeling. Both the no-arbitrage and the general equilibrium approaches of asset pricing theory are treated coherently within the general equilibrium framework.The analyses and coverage are up to date, comprehensive and in-depth. Topics include microeconomic foundation of asset pricing theory, the no-arbitrage principle and fundamental theorem, risk measurement and risk management, sequential portfolio choice, equity premium decomposition, option pricing, bond pricing and term structure of interest rates. The merits and limitations are expounded with respect to allocation and information market efficiency, along with the classical expectations hypothesis concerning the information content of yield curve and bond prices. Efforts are also made towards the resolution of several well-documented puzzles in empirical finance, which include the equity premium puzzle, the risk free rate puzzle, and the money-ness bias phenomenon of Black-Scholes option pricing model.The theory is self-contained and unified in presentation. The inclusion of proofs and derivations to enhance the transparency of the underlying arguments and conditions for the validity of the economic theory makes an ideal advanced textbook or reference book for graduate students specializing in financial economics and quantitative finance. The explanations are detailed enough to capture the interest of those curious readers, and complete enough to provide necessary background material needed to explore further the subject and research literature.

Primes and scores are the unbundled stock units which are created by Americus Trusts in 1983. These primes and scores enable shareholders to separate the potential capital appreciation above a stipulated dollar amount from the rights to receive dividends and all other attributes of share ownership. Value additivity theorem suggests that the sum of prime prices and score prices is equal to the stock prices or is less than the stock prices, if any management fee. Primes and scores show the premiums over stock prices consistantly over time, which is inconsistent with the predictions of value additivity theorem. Transaction cost saving hypothesis cannot explain the behaviors of premiums in primes and scores. As an alternative explanation, market incompleteness hypothesis is derived and tested. The empirical results support the market incompleteness hypothesis.