We consider the role of the endowment in nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit managers often describe the endowment, or fund balance, as serving a precautionary savings function. We provide a description of endowment size, for nonprofit organizations in a wide range of industries in the United States, and find that a large number of organizations have endowments that exceed levels that would norm...

The ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) was set up in 1993 and has already shown significant effects by 2010. This study empirically investigates the effect of trade creation on intra-ASEAN trade for the period of 1986 to 2010. Using the gravity model, we find that major determinants of bilateral trade in ASEAN are GDP, population, relative endowment, distance and common border. A dummy variable ...

We analyze general stochastic optimization financial problems under constraints in a general framework, which includes financial models with some “imperfection”, such as constrained portfolios, labor income, random endowment and large investor models. By using general optional decomposition under constraints in a multiplicative form, we first develop a dual formulation under minimal assumption ...

This study examines how the level of financial development in a community affects households’ decisions over how remittance income is spent. My findings suggest that in communities without banks remittances are more likely to be used for productive investments or to purchase assets. Increasing the size of the financial sector in communities with banks present increases the likelihood that remit...

This paper shows that the precautionary motive, combined with asset incompleteness, is a major source of volatility and indeterminacy in financial markets. Price fluctuations originate from agents' efforts to insure themselves through time by borrowing and lending instead of shifting income across states of nature by trading risky assets. A high interest rate at a future date reduces the potent...

Risk assessment is important for financial institution, especially in loan applications. Some have already implemented their own credit-scoring mechanisms to evaluate their clients’ risk and make decisions based on this indicator. In fact, the data gathered by financial institutions is valuable source of information to create information assets, from which credit-scoring mechanisms can be devel...

We consider a mean-variance hedging (MVH) problem for an arbitrage-free large financial market, i.e. a financial market with countably many risky assets modelled by a sequence of continuous semimartingales. By using the stochastic integration theory for a sequence of semimartingales developed in De Donno and Pratelli (2003), we extend the results about change of numéraire and MVH of Gourieroux,...

Th Feynman-Kac Formula offers an intuitive approach to solve PDE of financial assets. Traditionally, it is used to model financial assets without default risk.This paper demonstrates the usefulness of Feynman-Kac formula for pricing certain corporate bond models by revisiting Cathcart and El-Jahel (1998) and Schobel (1999).In the first model, a closed-form formula is derived to replace Cathcart...