Search Results
Journal Article
Asset mispricing, arbitrage, and volatility
Market efficiency remains a contentious topic among financial economists. The theoretical case for efficient markets rests on the notion of risk-free, cost-free arbitrage. In real markets, however, arbitrage is not risk-free or cost-free. In addition, the number of informed arbitrageurs and the supply of financial resources they have to invest in arbitrage strategies is limited. This article builds on an important recent model of arbitrage by professional traders who need?but lack?wealth of their own to trade. Professional abitrageurs must convince wealthy but uninformed investors to entrust ...
Working Paper
Deliverability and regional pricing in U.S. natural gas markets
During the 1980s and early '90s, interstate natural gas markets in the United States made a transition away from the regulation that characterized the previous three decades. With abundant supplies and plentiful pipeline capacity, a new order emerged in which freer markets and arbitrage closely linked natural gas price movements throughout the country. After the mid-1990s, however, U.S. natural gas markets tightened and some pipelines were pushed to capacity. We look for the pricing effects of limited arbitrage through causality testing between prices at nodes on the U.S. natural gas ...
Journal Article
Arbitrage: the key to pricing options
Arbitrage has become associated in popular attitudes with the most ruthless and profit-driven of human impulses, but the opposite reputation might be more well-deserved. The ability to arbitrage is essential for the efficient operation of markets. An interesting application of the principle of arbitrage arose when it provided the breakthrough insight in economists? solution to a formerly intractable problem: how to properly price the emergent financial instruments known as options.
Working Paper
Index arbitrage and nonlinear dynamics between the S&P 500 futures and cash
We use a cost of carry model with nonzero transactions costs to motivate estimation of a nonlinear dynamic relationship between the S&P 500 futures and cash indexes. Discontinuous arbitrage suggests that a threshold error correction mechanism may characterize many aspects of the relationship between the futures and cash indexes. We use minute-by-minute data on the S&P 500 futures and cash indexes. The results indicate that nonlinear dynamics are important and related to arbitrage and suggest that arbitrage is associated with more rapid convergence of the basis to the cost of carry than would ...
Working Paper
Exchange-rate puzzles in a model with arbitrage.
This paper documents the implications of arbitrage costs on the behavior of exchange rates in an open-economy liquidity model. The main motivation behind the paper is the growing evidence that the well-documented departures from purchasing power parity are due to a failure of the law of one price. The paper quantifies the importance of arbitrage costs for the variability, persistence, and autocorrelation of real and nominal exchange rates and compares the results with those of a model with nominal rigidities and firms pricing to market; second, the paper studies the impact of currency risk ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic risk and asset pricing: estimating the apt with observable factors
This paper develops and applies a new maximum likelihood method for estimating the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) model with observable risk factors. The approach involves simultaneous estimation of the factor loadings and risk premiums and can be applied to return panel with more securities than time series observations per security. Observable economic factors are found to account for 25 to 40 percent of the covariation in U.S. equity returns, and the APT pricing restrictions cannot be rejected for most sample periods. A significant "firm size anomaly" is measured, but it may be partly ...