Essays on derivatives

This dissertation comprises three essays that study three distinct derivative contracts. The first essay proves, in a model-free framework, that early exercise of futures-style options on futures, whether calls or puts, is suboptimal. The result is robust to transaction costs, liquidity constraints and collateral requirements. Assuming a frictionless market, three additional model-free results are obtained: (i) put-call parity, (ii) equality of time values of puts and calls with the same strike and expiration, and (iii) positivity of time value before expiration. The second essay develops a new invoice price formula for Treasury bond futures contracts as a more effective alternative to the current conversion factor system. The equilibrium "cheapest to deliver" and futures price at expiration are identified. The empirical part of the essay documents that the new function dramatically improves the ability of the futures invoice price to approximate the market prices of the corresponding deliverable bonds. The third essay offers a regression-based empirical study of the determinants of credit default swap premia. Leverage, volatility and interest rates are found to account for a large percentage of the variation of premia. A principal components analysis of the regression residuals finds no evidence of a missing factor. The results achieved for credit default premia more closely corroborate structural models of credit risk than those obtained by Collin-Dufresne et al. (2001) for corporate bond yield spreads