Econophysics And Capital Asset Pricing

This book rehabilitates beta as a definition of systemic risk by using particle physics to evaluate discrete components of financial risk. Much of the frustration with beta stems from the failure to disaggregate its discrete components; conventional beta is often treated as if it were "atomic" in the original Greek sense: uncut and indivisible. By analogy to the Standard Model of particle physics theory's three generations of matter and the three-way interaction of quarks, Chen divides beta as the fundamental unit of systemic financial risk into three matching pairs of "baryonic" components. The resulting econophysics of beta explains no fewer than three of the most significant anomalies and puzzles in mathematical finance. Moreover, the model's three-way analysis of systemic risk connects the mechanics of mathematical finance with phenomena usually attributed to behavioral influences on capital markets. Adding consideration of volatility and correlation, and of the distinct cash flow and discount rate components of systematic risk, harmonizes mathematical finance with labor markets, human capital, and macroeconomics.

This book proposes a new capital asset pricing model dubbed the ZCAPM that outperforms other popular models in empirical tests using US stock returns. The ZCAPM is derived from Fischer Black’s well-known zero-beta CAPM, itself a more general form of the famous capital asset pricing model (CAPM) by 1990 Nobel Laureate William Sharpe and others. It is widely accepted that the CAPM has failed in its theoretical relation between market beta risk and average stock returns, as numerous studies have shown that it does not work in the real world with empirical stock return data. The upshot of the CAPM’s failure is that many new factors have been proposed by researchers. However, the number of factors proposed by authors has steadily increased into the hundreds over the past three decades. This new ZCAPM is a path-breaking asset pricing model that is shown to outperform popular models currently in practice in finance across different test assets and time periods. Since asset pricing is central to the field of finance, it can be broadly employed across many areas, including investment analysis, cost of equity analyses, valuation, corporate decision making, pension portfolio management, etc. The ZCAPM represents a revolution in finance that proves the CAPM as conceived by Sharpe and others is alive and well in a new form, and will certainly be of interest to academics, researchers, students, and professionals of finance, investing, and economics.

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 1,3, University of Cooperative Education, 31 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The objective of this paper is to give an overview of the most important movements of the complex area of asset pricing. This will be tried by logically structuring and building up the topic from its origins, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, and then over its main points of critique, in order to arrive at the different options developed by financial science that try to resolve those problematic aspects. Due to the complexity of this subject and the limited scope of this paper, obviously it will not be possible to discuss each model or movement in depth. Coherently, the aim is to point out the main thoughts of each aspect discussed. For further information, especially concerning the deeper mathematical backgrounds and derivations of the models, the author would like to refer the reader to the books mentioned in this paper. Many of those works, finance journal publications and the literature on asset pricing in general, set their focus on different parts of this paper, which again underlines the complexity in terms of scientific scope and intellectual and mathematical intricacy of this topic.

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the mean-variance (M-V) rule, which are based on classic expected utility theory, have been heavily criticized theoretically and empirically. The advent of behavioral economics, prospect theory and other psychology-minded approaches in finance challenges the rational investor model from which CAPM and M-V derive. Haim Levy argues that the tension between the classic financial models and behavioral economics approaches is more apparent than real. This book aims to relax the tension between the two paradigms. Specifically, Professor Levy shows that although behavioral economics contradicts aspects of expected utility theory, CAPM and M-V are intact in both expected utility theory and cumulative prospect theory frameworks. There is furthermore no evidence to reject CAPM empirically when ex-ante parameters are employed. Professionals may thus comfortably teach and use CAPM and behavioral economics or cumulative prospect theory as coexisting paradigms.

While mainstream financial theories and applications assume that asset returns are normally distributed and individual preferences are quadratic, the overwhelming empirical evidence shows otherwise. Indeed, most of the asset returns exhibit “fat-tails” distributions and investors exhibit asymmetric preferences. These empirical findings lead to the development of a new area of research dedicated to the introduction of higher order moments in portfolio theory and asset pricing models. Multi-moment asset pricing is a revolutionary new way of modeling time series in finance which allows various degrees of long-term memory to be generated. It allows risk and prices of risk to vary through time enabling the accurate valuation of long-lived assets. This book presents the state-of-the art in multi-moment asset allocation and pricing models and provides many new developments in a single volume, collecting in a unified framework theoretical results and applications previously scattered throughout the financial literature. The topics covered in this comprehensive volume include: four-moment individual risk preferences, mathematics of the multi-moment efficient frontier, coherent asymmetric risks measures, hedge funds asset allocation under higher moments, time-varying specifications of (co)moments and multi-moment asset pricing models with homogeneous and heterogeneous agents. Written by leading academics, Multi-moment Asset Allocation and Pricing Models offers a unique opportunity to explore the latest findings in this new field of research.

Relying on the existence, in a complete market, of a pricing kernel, this book covers the pricing of assets, derivatives, and bonds in a discrete time, complete markets framework. It is primarily aimed at advanced Masters and PhD students in finance.-- Covers asset pricing in a single period model, deriving a simple complete market pricing model and using Stein's lemma to derive a version of the Capital Asset Pricing Model.-- Looks more deeply into some of the utility determinants of the pricing kernel, investigating in particular the effect of non-marketable background risks on the shape of the pricing kernel.-- Derives the prices of European-style contingent claims, in particular call options, in a one-period model; derives the Black-Scholes model assuming a lognormal distribution for the asset and a pricing kernel with constant elasticity, and emphasizes the idea of a risk-neutral valuation relationship between the price of a contingent claim on an asset and the underlying asset price.-- Extends the analysis to contingent claims on assets with non-lognormal distributions and considers the pricing of claims when risk-neutral valuation relationships do not exist.-- Expands the treatment of asset pricing to a multi-period economy, deriving prices in a rational expectations equilibrium.-- Uses the rational expectations framework to analyse the pricing of forward and futures contracts on assets and derivatives.-- Analyses the pricing of bonds given stochastic interest rates, and then uses this methodology to model the drift of forward rates, and as a special case the drift of the forward London Interbank Offer Rate in the LIBOR Market Model.