Trading Volumes in Dynamically Efficient Markets

The classic Lucas asset pricing model with complete markets stresses aggregate risk and, hence, fails to investigate the impact of agents heterogeneity on the dynamics of the equilibrium quantities and measures of trading volume. In this paper, we investigate under what conditions non-informational heterogeneity, i.e. differences in preferences and endowments, leads to non trivial trading volume in equilibrium. Our main result comes in form of a non-informational no trade theorem which provides necessary and sufficient conditions for zero trading volume in a dynamically efficient, continuous time Lucas market model with multiple goods and securities.General Equilibrium, Trading Volume; heterogenous agents; multiple goods; incomplete markets; no-trade theorem.

Growth Options in General Equilibrium: Some Asset Pricing Implications

We develop a general equilibrium model of a production economy which has a risky production technology as well as a growth option to expand the scale of the productive sector of the economy. We show that when confronted with growth options, the representative consumer may sharply alter consumption rates to improve the likelihood of investment. This reduction in consumption is accompanied by an erosion of the option value of waiting to invest, leading to investment near the zero NPV threshold. It also has important consequences for the evolution of risk aversion, asset prices and equilibrium interest rates which we characterize in this paper. One interesting prediction of the model is that we get time varying risk aversion and equity returns by virtue of the presence of growth option. We also find that the moneyness of the growth option is the key factor which determines the extent to which the book to market ratios will influence the conditional moments of equity returns.Time varying MRS; Growth Options; General Equilibrium

Perpetual Futures Pricing

Perpetual futures are contracts without expiration date in which the anchoring of the futures price to the spot price is ensured by periodic funding payments from long to short. We derive explicit expressions for the no-arbitrage price of various perpetual contracts, including linear, inverse, and quantos futures in both discrete and continuous-time. In particular, we show that the futures price is given by the risk-neutral expectation of the spot sampled at a random time that reflects the intensity of the price anchoring. Furthermore, we identify funding specifications that guarantee the coincidence of futures and spot prices, and show that for such specifications perpetual futures contracts can be replicated by dynamic trading in primitive securities

Corporate control and real investment in incomplete markets

In the standard real options approach to investment under uncertainty, agents formulate optimal policies under the assumptions of risk neutrality or perfect capital markets. However, in most situations, corporate executives face incomplete markets either because they receive compensation packages that restrict their portfolios or because cash flows from the firm’s investment opportunities are not spanned by those of existing assets. The present paper examines the impact of managerial risk aversion on investment decisions when the manager is exposed to idiosyncratic risk and faces the risk of a control challenge. In the paper, the investment policy selected by the manager reflects a trade-off between his incentives to reduce risk and the need to ensure sufficient efficiency to prevent control challenges. The analysis demonstrates that risk aversion induces the manager to speed up investment, leading to a significant erosion of the value of the option to wait

Event risk, contingent claims and the temporal resolution of uncertainty

We study the pricing and hedging of contingent claims that are subject to Event Risk which we define as rare and unpredictable events whose occurrence may be correlated to, but cannot be hedged perfectly with standard marketed instruments. The super-replication costs of such event sensitive contingent claims (ESCC), in general, provide little guidance for the pricing of these claims. Instead, we study utility based prices under two scenarios of resolution of uncertainty for event risk: when the event is continuously monitored, or when it is revealed only at the payment date. In both cases, we transform the incomplete market optimal portfolio choice problem of an agent endowed with an ESCC into a complete market problem with a state and possibly path-dependent utility function. For negative exponential utility, we obtain an explicit representation of the utility based prices under both information resolution scenarios and this in turn leads us to a simple characterization of the early resolution premium. For constant relative risk aversion utility functions we propose a simple numerical scheme and study the impact of size of the position, wealth and expected return on these prices

Endogenous Completeness of Diffusion Driven Equilibrium Markets

We study the existence of equilibria with endogenously complete mar- kets in a continuous-time, heterogenous agents economy driven by a multi- dimensional diffusion process. Our main results show that if prices are real analytic as functions of time and the state variables of the model then a suffi- cient condition for market completeness is that the volatility of dividends be nondegenerate. In contrast to previous research, our formulation does not require that securities pay terminal dividends and thus allows for both finite or infinite horizon economies. We illustrate our results by providing easily applicable conditions for market completeness in two benchmark cases: that where the state variables are given by a vector autoregressive process and that where they are given by a vector of autonomous diffusion processes. We also provide counterexamples which show that real analyticity cannot be dispensed with if one is to deduce dynamic market completeness from the structure of dividends