Downside risk of derivative portfolios with mean-reverting underlyings

We carry out a Monte-Carlo simulation of a standard portfolio management strategy involving derivatives, to estimate the sensitivity of its downside risk to a change of mean-reversion of the underlyings. We find that the higher the intensity of mean-reversion, the lower the probability of reaching a pre-determined loss level. This phenomenon appears of large statistical significance for large enough loss levels. We also find that the higher the mean-reversion intensity of the underlyings, the longer the expected time to reach those loss levels. The simulations suggest that selecting underlyings with high mean-reversion effect is a natural way to reduce the downside risk of those widely traded assets.Monte Carlo simulation; mean-reverting underlyings

Threshold cointegration relationships between oil and stock markets

The aim of this paper is to study the oil price adjustment dynamics and to implicitly test the efficiency hypothesis for the oil market. Thus, we propose to study the oil price evolution in a nonlinear framework while testing the interdependence hypothesis between oil and stock markets. Four countries, the USA, France, Mexico and the Philippines are concerned by our findings which show several important results. Firstly, we show some evidence of linear linkage between stock markets and oil industry and we prove the existence of significant long-run relationships between oil and stock markets, indicating that the oil market is not efficient. Secondly, using nonlinear cointegration techniques, we propose a new nonlinear modeling to reproduce the oil price adjustment dynamics. It takes into account both stock and oil market variations. More importantly, the oil price is nonlinear, mean-reverting toward the equilibrium and with an adjustment speed that increases according to oil price deviations toward the stock market equilibrium.Oil price adjustment; stock markets; nonlinear cointegration

Monte-Carlo Estimations of the Downside Risk of Derivative Portfolios

We simulate the performance of a standard derivatives portfolio to evaluate the relevance of benchmarking in terms of doenside risk reduction. The simulation shows that benchmarking always leads to significantly more servere losses in average than those generated by letting the portfolio reach the end of a given horizon. Moreover, switching from a 0-correlation across underlyings to a very mild form of correclation significantly increased the probability of reaching the downside benchmark before maturity, whereas aadding more correlation does not significantly increase this figure

The Economics of upgrading to innovative treatment technologies in the fight against HIV/AIDS

Abstract. We argue that current funding campaigns to fight AIDS in developing countries fail to recognize significant losses associated with the introduction of innovative treatment technologies. For instance, the future albeit uncertain appearance and widespread use of a therapeutic vaccine will trigger significant and unrecoverable losses in current drugs treatment investments. Our objective is then two-fold. We first document losses associated with the transition to better treatment technologies and we show that failure to hedge against such losses leads to sub-optimal policies. Our second objective is to provide policy recommendations to alleviate this problem. We show how to transform some cutting-hedge financial products to generate full insurance coverage against such losses, and in some cases how to achieve full risk-sharing with agencies developing innovative treatments. We recommend that every funding campaign in current AIDS treatments be accompanied with the provision of such insurance against the cost of switching to future albeit uncertain innovative treatments

Market Power, Survival and Accuracy of Predictions in Financial Markets*

In a standard General Equilibrium framework, we consider an agent strategically using her large volum of trade to influence asset prices to increase her consumption. We show that , as in Sandroni (2000) for the competitive case, if markets are dynamically complete and some general conditions on market preferences are met then this agent' long-run consumption will vanish if she makes less accurate predictions than the market, and will maintain her market power otherwise. We thus agrue that the Market Selection Hypothesis extends to this situation of market power, in contract to Alchain (1950) and Friedman (1953) who claimed that this selection was solely driven by the competitivness of markets

Psychological Aspects of Market Crashes

This paper analyzes the sensitivity of market crashes to investors' psychology in a standard general equilibrium framework. Contrary to the traditional view that market crashes are driven by large drops in aggregate endowments. We argue from a theoretical standpoint that individual anticipations of such drops are necessary condition for crashes to occur and that the magnitude of such crashes are positively correlated with the level of individual anticipations of drops

A market microstructure explanation of IPOs underpricing

In a typical IPO game with first-price auctions, we argue that risk-averse investors always underbid in equilibrium because of sucbjective interpreetations of the firm' communications about its actual value and resulting risk aversion about the likelihood of facing investors with higher valuations. We show that the noisier the investors' inferences of the firm' value(in the sense of first-order stochastic dominance) the higher the underbidding level. Our finding is independent of winner's curse effects and possible irrational, and allows for a testable theory

Regulatory Practices and the Impossibility to Extract Truthful Risk Information

We consider a regulator providing deposit insurance to a bank with private informataion about its investment portfolio. Following current regulatory practices, we assume that the regulator does not commit to audit and sanction after any risk report from the bank. We show that, in absence of commitment, the socially optimal contract leads a high-risk bank to misreport its risk with positive probability in most cases. Wer also isolate cases when truthful risk report is optimal. We this extablish that extraction of truthful risk information is not socially optimal in most cases given current regulatioy practices

Regulatory Practices and the Impossibility to Extract Truthful Risk Information

We consider a regulator providing deposit insurance to a bank with private informataion about its investment portfolio. Following current regulatory practices, we assume that the regulator does not commit to audit and sanction after any risk report from the bank. We show that, in absence of commitment, the socially optimal contract leads a high-risk bank to misreport its risk with positive probability in most cases. Wer also isolate cases when truthful risk report is optimal. We this extablish that extraction of truthful risk information is not socially optimal in most cases given current regulatioy practices

A market microstructure explanation of IPOs underpricing

In a typical IPO game with first-price auctions, we argue that risk-averse investors always underbid in equilibrium because of sucbjective interpreetations of the firm' communications about its actual value and resulting risk aversion about the likelihood of facing investors with higher valuations. We show that the noisier the investors' inferences of the firm' value(in the sense of first-order stochastic dominance) the higher the underbidding level. Our finding is independent of winner's curse effects and possible irrational, and allows for a testable theory