Bücher von Peter O'Connor

Slow wonder bears witness to the possibilities of the imagination. In a series of letters the authors playfully imagine alternatives to current orthodoxies that privilege technocratic approaches to education that have strangled discussion about what it might mean to make education good and right, or even beautiful. The authors position the imagination as a powerful site of resistance within education and academic life. They unpack their philosophical positionings through vignettes of their teaching practice, poetry written as reflective musings and discursive theoretical pieces, including letters they have written to others. They attempt to marry the poetic and the academic, the rational and the affective, to model a slow approach to wondering about the joy, beauty and possibilities of life. In this spirit, they contemplate new ways to think and live in education.

The Black-Scholes model was a revelation and took a large step forward in terms of mathematical application in quantitative finance. An empirical trait is that the model has generally been used by practitioners in an ad-hoc fashion. This may explain why actual option prices have rarely converged to respective Black-Scholes estimates. Empirical options research has highlighted systematic biases within the model and has attempted to correct for these by proposing models that offer greater consistency in both internal processes and pricing performance. In this thesis, we explore the fundamental reasons for failure in the Black-Scholes and analyse the benefit of augmenting the model for processes that may be more consistent with the real world. We place emphasis on consistency between the option-implicit distribution of the underlying asset and the actual implicit distribution of the underlying asset. Using a three year FTSE 100 option dataset, we quantitatively examine the pricing consistency and reliability of such augmented models.