February 13th, 2005, 4:19 pm
Is this a homework question? I don't mind helping with them, but if it is it would be a lot clearer with the course title and text.On the surface the question doesn't make much sense. The only asset price model I can think of that could be labeled "regression" is a covariance approach used in the Capital Asset Pricing Model and Riskmetrics, for examples. All interesting asset price process models are stochastic. "Reduced-form" is used in so many different ways that it doesn't clarify your question much. In finance, it is used almost entirely to refer to Beaver-Altman type predictions of bankruptcy based on accounting ratios.While most finance professionals understand its use in older econometrics literature (Lucas and Sargent), almost all useful financial models are reduced-form in this sense. In more recent econometrics, calling someone's model reduced-form seems to mean, "okay, you're right and I can't get an answer at all, but that's because I'm a deeper thinker than you." Structural/Reduced-form is the kind of hair-splitting that drove a lot of us out of economics into a field where hard data matters more than politics.