2013 Theses Doctoral

Two Papers of Financial Engineering Relating to the Risk of the 2007--2008 Financial Crisis

Zhong, Haowen

This dissertation studies two financial engineering and econometrics problems relating to two facets of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. In the first part, we construct the Spatial Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Spatial Arbitrage Pricing Theory to characterize the risk premiums of futures contracts on real estate assets. We also provide rigorous econometric analysis of the new models. Empirical study shows there exists significant spatial interaction among the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index futures returns. In the second part, we perform empirical studies on the jump risk in the equity market. We propose a simple affine jump-diffusion model for equity returns, which seems to outperform existing ones (including models with Levy jumps) during the financial crisis and is at least as good during normal times, if model complexity is taken into account. In comparing the models, we made two empirical findings: (i) jump intensity seems to increase significantly during the financial crisis, while on average there appears to be little change of jump sizes; (ii) finite number of large jumps in returns for any finite time horizon seem to fit the data well both before and after the crisis.