An Analysis of the Implications for Stock and Futures Price Volatility of Program Trading and Dynamic Hedging Strategies

Recent advances in financial theory have created an understanding of the environments in which a real security can be synthesized by a dynamic trading strategy in a risk free asset and other securities. We contend that there is a crucial distinction between a synthetic security and a real security, in particular the notion that a real security is redundant when it can be synthesized by a dynamic trading strategy ignores the informational role of real securities markets. The replacement of a real security by synthetic strategies may in itself cause enough uncertainty about the price volatility of the underlying security that the real security is no longer redundant. Portfolio insurance provides a good example of the difference between a synthetic security and a real security. One form of portfolio insurance uses a trading strategy in risk free securities ("cash") and index futures to synthesize a European put on the underlying portfolio. In the absence of a real traded put option (of the appropriate striking price and maturity), there will be less information about the future price volatility associated with current dynamic hedging strategies. There will thus be less information transmitted to those people who could make capital available to liquidity providers. It will therefore be more difficult for the market to absorb the trades implied by the dynamic hedging strategies, In effect, the stocks' future price volatility can rise because of a current lack of information about the extent to which dynamic hedging strategies are in place.

Consumption Correlatedness and Risk Measurement in Economies with Non trade Assets and Heterogeneous Information

The consumption beta theorem of Breeden makes the expected return on any asset a function only of its covariance with changes in aggregate consumption. It is shown that the theorem is more robust than was indicated by Breeden. The theorem obtains even if one deletes Breeden's assumptions that (a) all risky assets are tradable, (b) investors have homogeneous beliefs, (c) other assets can be traded without transactions costs and (d) that all assets have returns which are Ito processes.

One Share/One Vote and the Market for Corporate Control

A corporation's securities provide the holder with particular claims on the firm's income stream and particular voting rights. These securities can be designed in various ways: one share of a particular class may have a claim to votes which is disproportionately larger or smaller than its claim to income. In this paper we analyze some of the forces which make it desirable to set up the corporation so that all securities have the same proportion of votes as their claim to income ("one share/one vote"). We show that security structure influences both the conditions under which a control change takes place and the terms on which it occurs. First, the allocation of voting rights to securities determines which securities a party must acquire in order to win control. Secondly, the assignment of income claims to the same securities determines the cost of acquiring these voting rights. We will show that it is in shareholders' interest to set the cost of acquiring control to be as large as possible, consistent with a control change occurring whenever this increases shareholder wealth. Under certain assumptions, one share/one vote best achieves this goal. We distinguish between two classes of benefits from control: private benefits and security benefits. The private benefits of control refer to benefits the current management or the acquirer obtain for themselves, but which the target security holders do not obtain. The security benefits refer to the total market value of the corporation's securities. The assignment of income claims to voting rights determines the extent 'to which an acquirer must face competition from parties who value the firm for its security benefits rather than its private benefits.

Liquidity and Market Structure

Market liquidity is modeled as being determined by the demand and supply of immediacy. Exogenous liquidity events coupled with the risk of delayed trade create a demand for immediacy. Market makers supply immediacy by their continuous presence. and willingness to bear risk during the time period between the arrival of final buyers and sellers. In the long run the number of market makers adjusts to equate the supply and demand for immediacy. This determine the equilibrium level of liquidity in the market. The lower is the autocorrelation in rates of return, the higher is the equilibrium level of liquidity.

Estimating the Continuous Time Consumption Based Asset Pricing Model

The consumption based asset pricing model predicts that excess yields are determined in a fairly simple way by the market's degree of relative risk aversion and by the pattern of covariances between percapita consumption growth and asset returns. Estimation and testingis complicated by the fact that the model's predictions relate to the instantaneous flow of consumption and point-in-time asset values, but only data on the integral or unit average of the consumption flow is available. In our paper, we show how to estimate the parameters of interest consistently from the available data by maximum likelihood. We estimate the market's degree of relative risk aversion and the instantaneous covariances of asset yields and consumption using six different data sets. We also test the model's overidentifying restrictions.

Monetary Dynamics with Proportional Transaction Costs and Fixed Payment Periods

A general equilibrium model of an economy is presented where people hold money rather than bonds in order to economize on transaction costs. In any such model it is not optimal for individuals to instantaneously adjust their money holdings when new information arrives. The (endogenous) delayed response to new information generates a response to a new monetary policy which is quite different from that of standard flexible price models of monetary equilibrium. Though all goods markets instantaneously clear, the monetary transaction cost causes delayed responses in nominal variables to a change in monetary policy. This in turn causes real variables to respond to the new monetary policy.The two classes of monetary policies analyzed here are price level policies and interest rate policies. Price level policies are monetary policies which in general equilibrium keep the nominal rate constant, but change the long run price level . We show that the money supply must rise gradually to its new steady level if the price level is to be raised without causing nominal interest rates to fall. When interest rate policies are analyzed, it becomes clear that aggregate money demand at time t depends on the path of interest rates, not just the instantaneous interest rate at time t. This is because the aggregate money holding at time t is composed of the money holdings of various consumers,each of whom has a different but overlapping holding period. The staggering of money holding periods is a necessary condition for general equilibrium; general equilibrium requires that some consumers must be incrementing their cash when other consumers are decrementing their cash via spending. Some results of our analysis include the fact that high frequency movements of the interest rate cause a much smaller change in money demand than low frequency movements, since it is the integral of the interest rateover a holding period which determines money demand. Further, at high frequencies, the rate of inflation is not the difference between the nominal interest rate and the rate of time preference.

Unemployment with Observable Aggregate Shocks

Consider an economy subject to two kinds of shocks: (a) an observable shock to the relative demand for final goods which causes dispersion in relative prices, and (b) shocks, unobservable by workers, to the technology for transforming intermediate goods into final goods. A worker in a particular intermediate goods industry knows that the unobserved price of his output is determined by (1) the technological shock that determines which final goods industry uses his output intensively and (2) the price of the final good that uses his output intensively. When there is very little relative price dispersion among final goods, then it doesn't matter which final goods industry uses the worker's output. Thus the technological shock is of very little importance in creating uncertainty about the worker's marginal product when there is little dispersion of relative prices. Hence an increase in the dispersion of relative prices amplifies the effect of technological uncertainty on a worker's marginal value product. We consider a model of optimal labor contracts in a situation where the workers have less information than the firm about their marginal value product. A relative price shock of the type described above increases the uncertainty which workers have about their marginal value product. We show that with an optimal asymmetric information employment contract the industries which are adversely affected by the relative price shock will contract more than they would under complete information (i.e., where workers could observe their marginal value product). On the other hand the industry which is favorably affected by the relative price shock will - not expand by more than would be the case under complete information. Hence an observed relative demand shock, which would leave aggregate employment unchanged under complete information, will cause aggregate employment to fall under asymmetric information about the technological shock.

The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration

Our theory of costly contracts emphasizes that contractual rights can be of two types: specific rights and residual rights. When it is costly to list all specific rights over assets in the contract, it may be optimal to let one party purchase all residual rights. Ownership is the purchase of these residual rights. When residual rights are purchased by one party, they are lost by a second party, and this inevitably creates distortions. Firm 1 purchases firm 2 when firm 1's control increases the productivity of its management more than the loss of control decreases the productivity of firm 2's management.Economic

The Determinants of the Variability of Stock Market Prices

The most familiar interpretation for the large and unpredictable swings that characterize common stock price indices is that price changes represent the efficient discounting of "new information" It is remarkable given the popularity of this interpretation that it has never been established what this information is about. Recent work by Shiller, and Stephen LeRoy and Richard Porter, has shown evidence that the variability of stock price indices cannot be accounted for by information regarding future dividends since dividends just do not seem to vary enough to justify the price movement. These studies assume a constant discount factor. In this paper, we consider whether the variability of stock prices can be attributed to information regarding discount factors (i.e., real interest rates), which are in turn related to current and future levels of economic activity. The appropriate discount factor to be applied to dividends which are received k years from today is the marginal rate of substitution between consumption today and consumption k periods from today, We use historical data on per capita consumption from 1890-1979 to estimate the realized value of these marginal rates of substitution. Theoretically, as LeRoy and C. J. La Civita have also noted independently of us, consumption variability may induce stock price variability whose magnitude depends on the degree of risk aversion.