The book presents models for the pricing of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, and options. The models are formulated and analyzed using concepts and techniques from mathematics and probability theory. It presents important classic models and some recent 'state-of-the-art' models that outperform the classics.

This book will provide a firm foundation in the understanding of financial economics applied to asset pricing. It carries the real world perspective of how the market works, including behavioral biases, and also wraps that understanding in the context of a rigorous economics framework of investors’ risk preferences, underlying price dynamics, rational choice in the large, and market equilibrium other than inexplicable irrational bubbles. It concentrates on analyses of stock, credit, and option pricing. Existing highly cited finance models in pricing of these assets are covered in detail, and theory is accompanied by rigorous applications of econometrics. Econometrics contain elucidations of both the statistical theory as well as the practice of data analyses. Linear regression methods and some nonlinear methods are also covered. The contribution of this book, and at the same time, its novelty, is in employing materials in probability theory, economics optimization, econometrics, and data analyses together to provide a rigorous and sharp intellect for investment and financial decision-making. Mistakes are often made with far too often sweeping pragmatism without deeply knowing the underpinnings of how the market economics works. This book is written at a level that is both academically rigorous for university courses in investment, derivatives, risk management, as well as not too mathematically deep so that finance and banking graduate professionals can have a real journey into the frontier financial economics thinking and rigorous data analytical findings.

This book provides a broad introduction of modern asset pricing theory with equal treatments for both discrete-time and continuous-time modeling. Both the no-arbitrage and the general equilibrium approaches of asset pricing theory are treated coherently within the general equilibrium framework.The analyses and coverage are up to date, comprehensive and in-depth. Topics include microeconomic foundation of asset pricing theory, the no-arbitrage principle and fundamental theorem, risk measurement and risk management, sequential portfolio choice, equity premium decomposition, option pricing, bond pricing and term structure of interest rates. The merits and limitations are expounded with respect to allocation and information market efficiency, along with the classical expectations hypothesis concerning the information content of yield curve and bond prices. Efforts are also made towards the resolution of several well-documented puzzles in empirical finance, which include the equity premium puzzle, the risk free rate puzzle, and the money-ness bias phenomenon of Black-Scholes option pricing model.The theory is self-contained and unified in presentation. The inclusion of proofs and derivations to enhance the transparency of the underlying arguments and conditions for the validity of the economic theory makes an ideal advanced textbook or reference book for graduate students specializing in financial economics and quantitative finance. The explanations are detailed enough to capture the interest of those curious readers, and complete enough to provide necessary background material needed to explore further the subject and research literature.

Wolfgang Drobetz provides empirical evidence on the time variation of expected stock returns over the stages of the business cycle.

Winner of the prestigious Paul A. Samuelson Award for scholarly writing on lifelong financial security, John Cochrane's Asset Pricing now appears in a revised edition that unifies and brings the science of asset pricing up to date for advanced students and professionals. Cochrane traces the pricing of all assets back to a single idea--price equals expected discounted payoff--that captures the macro-economic risks underlying each security's value. By using a single, stochastic discount factor rather than a separate set of tricks for each asset class, Cochrane builds a unified account of modern asset pricing. He presents applications to stocks, bonds, and options. Each model--consumption based, CAPM, multifactor, term structure, and option pricing--is derived as a different specification of the discounted factor. The discount factor framework also leads to a state-space geometry for mean-variance frontiers and asset pricing models. It puts payoffs in different states of nature on the axes rather than mean and variance of return, leading to a new and conveniently linear geometrical representation of asset pricing ideas. Cochrane approaches empirical work with the Generalized Method of Moments, which studies sample average prices and discounted payoffs to determine whether price does equal expected discounted payoff. He translates between the discount factor, GMM, and state-space language and the beta, mean-variance, and regression language common in empirical work and earlier theory. The book also includes a review of recent empirical work on return predictability, value and other puzzles in the cross section, and equity premium puzzles and their resolution. Written to be a summary for academics and professionals as well as a textbook, this book condenses and advances recent scholarship in financial economics.

This book is intended as a textbook for Ph.D. students in finance and as a reference book for academics. It is written at an introductory level but includes detailed proofs and calculations as section appendices. It covers the classical results on single-period, discrete-time, and continuous-time models. It also treats various proposed explanations for the equity premium and risk-free rate puzzles: persistent heterogeneous idiosyncratic risks, internal habits, external habits, and recursive utility. Most of the book assumes rational behavior, but two topics important for behavioral finance are covered: heterogeneous beliefs and non-expected-utility preferences. There are also chapters on asymmetric information and production models. The book includes numerous exercises designed to provide practice with the concepts and also to introduce additional results. Each chapter concludes with a notes and references section that supplies references to additional developments in the field.

This book covers the fundamentals of financial management and investment management without getting into the highly technical topics and mathematical rigor. It also provides a practitioner-oriented approach to financial and investment management.The field of finance covers several specialty areas. The two most important ones which set the foundations for the other specialty areas are financial management and investment management, and these are the two major topics covered in the book. After touching on the basics — the financial system and the players, financial statements, and mathematics of finance — the authors then cover financial management and investment management in greater depth. For financial management the authors focus on financial strategy and financial planning, dividend policy, corporate financing decisions, entrepreneurial finance, financial risk management, and capital budgeting decisions. The investment management coverage includes the different types of risks faced in investing, company analysis, valuing common stock, portfolio selection, asset pricing theory, and investing in common stocks and bonds. The last chapter of the book covers financial derivatives and how they are used in finance to control risk.