In option pricing models with correlated stochastic processes, an option premium is commonly a solution to a partial differential equation (PDE) with mixed derivatives in more than two space dimensions. Alternating direction implicit (ADI) finite difference methods are popular for solving a PDE...

This paper constructs a new estimator for large covariance matrices by drawing a bridge between the classic Stein (1975) estimator in finite samples and recent progress under large-dimensional asymptotics. The estimator keeps the eigenvectors of the sample covariance matrix and applies shrinkage...

We propose a way to compute the hedging Delta using the Malliavin weight method. Our approach, which we name the l-method, generally outperforms the standard Monte Carlo finite difference method, especially for discontinuous payoffs. Furthermore, our approach is nonparametric, as we only assume...

In insurance mathematics, optimal control problems over an infinite time horizon arise when computing risk measures. An example of such a risk measure is the expected discounted future dividend payments. In models which take multiple economic factors into account, this problem is...

Decisions with long-term consequences require comparing utility derived from present consumption to future welfare. But can we infer socially relevant intertemporal preferences from saving behavior? I allow for a decomposition of the present generation's preference for the next generation into...

This paper estimates the importance of temptation (Gul and Pesendorfer, 2001) for consumption smoothing and asset accumulation in a structural life-cycle model. We use two complementary estimation strategies: first, we estimate the Euler equation of this model; and second we match liquid and...

We provide evidence that households discretize their inflation expectations so that what matters for durable consumption decisions is the broad inflation regime they expect. Using survey data, we document that a large share of the adjustment in the average inflation expectation comes from the...