A General Equilibrium Financial Asset Economy with Transaction Costs and Trading Constraints

This paper presents a unified framework for examining the general equilibrium effects of transactions costs and trading constraints on security market trades and prices. The model uses a discrete time/state framework and Kuhn-Tucker theory to characterize the optimal decisions of consumers and financial intermediaries. Transaction costs and constraints give rise to regions of no trade and to bid-ask spreads: their existence frustrate the derivation of standard results in arbitrage-based pricing. Nevertheless, we are able to obtain as dual characterizations of our primal problems, one-sided arbitrage pricing results and a personalized martingale representation of asset pricing. These pricing results are identical to those derived by Jouini and Kallal (1995) using arbitrage arguments. The paper's framework incorporates a number of specialized existing models and results, proves new results and discusses new directions for research. In particular, we include characterizations of intermediaries who hold optimal portfolios; brokers who do not hold portfolios, and consumer-specific transactions costs and trading constraints. Furthermore we show that in the special case of equiproportional transaction costs and a sufficient number of assets, there is an analogue of the arbitrage pricing result for European derivatives where prices are interpreted as mid-prices between the bid-ask spread. We discuss the effects of non-convex transaction technologies on prices and trades.Financial Markets, Transaction Costs, Trading Constraints, Asset Pricing, General Equilibrium, Incomplete Markets

Canada's Approach to Financial Regulation

This paper discusses aspects of designing appropriate financial regulation for Canada. It outlines a theory of financial system organization and uses it to assess recent legislative actions and proposals. The paper argues that current and proposed regulation incorporates too many constraints and does not provide for sufficient information dissemination. Nor does it in all cases provide appropriate incentives for improved system functioning.

A General Equilibrium Financial Asset Economy with Transaction Costs and Trading Constraints

This paper presents a unified framework for examining the general equilibrium effects of transactions costs and trading constraints on security market trades and prices. The model uses a discrete time/state framework and Kuhn- Tucker theory to characterize the optimal decisions of consumers and financial intermediaries. Transaction costs and constraints give rise to regions of no trade and to bid-ask spreads: their existence frustrate the derivation of standard results in arbitrage-based pricing. Nevertheless, we are able to obtain as dual characterisations of our primal problems, one-sided arbitrage pricing results and a personalised martingale representation of asset pricing. These pricing results are identical to those derived by Jouini and Kallal (1995) using arbitrage arguments. The paper’s framework incorporates a number of specialised existing models and results, proves new results and discusses new directions for research. In particular, we include characterisations of intermediaries who hold optimal portfolios; brokers who do not hold portfolios, and consumer-specifi

The Stochastic Cash Balance Problem with Fixed Costs for Increases and Decreases

The stochastic cash balance problem is an inventory problem in which the stochastic cash (or inventory) change can either be positive or nonpositive, and in which decisions to increase or decrease the inventory are permitted at the beginning of each time period. The paper studies problems in which both fixed and proportional costs can be incurred whenever the inventory is changed in either direction. An example is used to demonstrate that when these costs are positive and the loss function is convex, a simple policy (analogous to a two-sided (s, S) policy) is not generally optimal. The example is also used to display the relations between the cash balance problem and inventory problems previously studied by Scarf and Veinott. When proportional costs of changing the inventory are zero, the two fixed costs are equal, the loss function is symmetric quasi-convex, and the problem's probability densities are quasi-concave a simple policy is shown to be optimal. For the cases in which simple policies are not optimal, the paper develops a technique which employs convex upper and lower bounds on the (nonconvex) cost functions partially to describe the optimal policy. It is suggested that this convex bounding technique may provide an approach to studying the cost implications of following simple, nonoptimal policies in inventory problems for which the optimal policy is complex.

Disaggregating marketplace attitudes toward risk: a contingent-claim-based model

With a view to providing economic interpretations of temporal changes in Risk-Neutral Probability Distributions (RNPDs), this article estimates RNPDs from option prices, then studies the expected excess returns on a fixed-strategy reference portfolio constructed from RNPD-defined contingent claims. It disaggregates the reference portfolio into an investment, an insurance and a certainty component, each containing one type of contingent claim (having positive, negative or zero expected excess return, respectively). The disaggregation provides a convenient way of operationalizing Markowitz's semi-variance measures, one for upside potential and one for downside risk. Our empirical tests show that the pricing of investment-oriented claims is related to both S&P index growth and volatility, but the pricing of insurance-oriented claims is related only to index volatility. Moreover, the relative importance of insurance earnings to total earnings appears principally to be related to volatility. Thus our analyses show that investment and insurance claims are priced differently in the marketplace, and the different pricing effects can be identified by disaggregating the reference portfolio returns.