In this paper we analyze how an individual should optimally invest in human capital when he also has financial wealth. We treat the individual’s option to take more education as expansion options and apply real option analysis. We characterize the individual’s optimal consumption strategy and portfolio weights. The individual has a demand for hedging financial risk, labor income risk, and also ...

MARCH 1995 Hedging interest rate risk has become one of the most common and important types of a financial manager's risk management activities. A classic example is for a firm to hedge its cost of funds by using an interest rate cap to place an upper bound on its borrowing costs. The hedge typically consists of a sequence of individual call options on the interest rate, with option expiration ...

We consider the hedging of options when the price of the underlying asset is always exposed to the possibility of jumps of random size. Working in a single factor Markovian setting, we derive a new spanning relation between a given option and a continuum of shorter-term options written on the same asset. In this portfolio of shorter-term options, the portfolio weights do not vary with the under...

Motivated by a production planning problem in an actual global manufacturing network, we examine the impact of exchange-rate uncertainty ... namely the volatility in an& correlations among exchange rates ... on the choice of various optimal production policies and the conditions which lead to them. A two-stage stochastic program with recourse is developed that provides opportunities to hedge fi...

In this article we address the problem of valuing and hedging American options on baskets and spreads, i.e., on portfolios consisting of both long and short positions. We adopt the main ideas of the Generalized Lognormal (GLN) approach introduced in Borovkova et al. (2007) and extend them to the case of American options. We approximate the basket price process by a suitable Geometric Brownian m...

In the presence of transaction costs, it is no longer possible to perfectly replicate the payoff of a European option by trading in the underlying stock. This paper develops a new option hedging strategy based on minimizing the expected cumulative hedging error and additional cost of rebalancing due to proportional transaction costs. We show that the resulting singular stochastic control proble...

This paper resolves the conceptual ambiguity of real option value and derives a model using risk-adjusted discount rates that can be applied to value the option to invest in a project. The approach adopts stochastic revenue and costs which provide a general solution with the added virtue of applicability. We found the option value arises from the difference between an individual investor and th...

One of the most successful approaches to option hedging with transaction costs is the utility based approach, pioneered by Hodges and Neuberger (1989). Judging against the best possible tradeoff between the risk and the costs of a hedging strategy, this approach seems to achieve excellent empirical performance. However, this approach has one major drawback that prevents the broad application of...