Implied volatility is one of the key issues in modern quantitative finance, since plain vanilla option prices contain vital information for pricing and hedging of exotic and illiquid options. European plain vanilla options are nowadays widely traded, which results in a great amount of...

A primary goal in modelling the implied volatility surface (IVS) for pricing andhedging aims at reducing complexity. For this purpose one fits the IVS each dayand applies a principal component analysis using a functional norm. This approach, however, neglects the degenerated string structure of...

The pricing accuracy and pricing performance of local volatility models cruciallydepends on absence of arbitrage in the implied volatility surface: an input impliedvolatility surface that is not arbitrage-free invariably results in negative transitionprobabilities and/ or negative local...

A huge body of empirical and theoretical literature has emerged on the relationship between foreign exchange (FX) uncertainty and international trade. Empirical findings about the impact of FX uncertainty on trade figures are at best weak and often ambiguous with respect to its direction. Almost...

In this study we forecast the term structure of FIBOR/EURIBOR swap rates by means of recursive vector autoregressive (VAR) models. In advance, a principal components analysis (PCA) is adopted to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure. To evaluate ex–ante forecasting performance for...