Essays in financial economics : terror, consumption, and investment, currency options and liquidity premium, and purchasing power parity

This thesis is composed of three chapters, each includes one paper. The first chapter includes a paper that analyses the impact of terror on consumption and investment. This paper provides evidence on how consumers and investors react to terror attacks based on a new database from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An increase in terror casualties triggers households to alter their perceived personal security and expected future income. Only ex-post do households distinguish a temporary from a permanent increase in terror casualties. A temporary increase in the number of terror casualties causes a bust-boom cycle of durables consumption and irreversible investment; nondurables are affected less. A permanent increase in the number of terror casualties causes a one-time drop in consumption. This is in line with the theory on irreversible investment and durables consumption: terror generates temporary uncertainty about personal security and future income, which in turn causes a bust-boom cycle of durables due to bunching of purchases in later periods. A permanent increase in terror causes neither bunching nor boom. Similar results are obtained for the effect of terror casualties on fixed capital. The second chapter includes a paper titled: "Arbitrage Tests of Israel's Currency Options Markets." The aims of this study are threefold. First, we test the validity of the Black and Scholes (B-S) model as a naive option-pricing model for the case of an exchange-rate target zone. We find that although we cannot reject the weakly efficient market hypothesis (except for very-near-maturity deep-ITM options), we can reject the strongly efficient market and/or the B-S model validity hypotheses.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• HajYehia, Samer

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Whitney Newey and Jerry Hausman.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29432

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/29432