We investigate the problem of calibrating an exponential Lévy model based on market prices of vanilla options. We show that this inverse problem is in general severely ill-posed and we derive exact minimax rates of convergence. The estimation procedure we propose is based on the explicit...

The calibration of financial models has become rather important topic in recent years mainly because of the need to price increasingly complex options in a consistent way. The choice of the underlying model is crucial for the good performance of any calibration procedure. Recent empirical...

Observing prices of European put and call options, we calibrate exponential Lévy models nonparametrically. We discuss the implementation of the spectral estimation procedures for Lévy models of finite jump activity as well as for self-decomposable Lévy models and improve these methods....

Confidence intervals and joint confidence sets are constructed for the nonparametric calibration of exponential Lévy models based on prices of European options. This is done by showing joint asymptotic normality for the estimation of the volatility, the drift, the intensity and the Lévy...

We study the nonparametric calibration of exponential, self-decomposable Levy models whose jump density can be characterized by the k-function, which is typically nonsmooth at zero. On the one hand the estimation of the drift, the activity measure alpha:= k(0+) + k(0-) and analog parameters for...

This paper studies polar sets of anisotropic Gaussian random fields, i.e. sets which a Gaussian random field does not hit almost surely. The main assumptions are that the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix are bounded from below and that the canonical metric associated with the Gaussian random...

Given n equidistant realisations of a Lévy process (Lt; t = 0), a natural estimator for the distribution function N of the Lévy measure is constructed. Under a polynomial decay restriction on the characteristic function, a Donsker-type theorem is proved, that is, a functional central limit...

State price density (SPD) contains important information concerning market expectations. In existing literature, a constrained estimator of the SPD is found by nonlinear least squares in a suitable Sobolev space. We improve the behavior of this estimator by implementing a covariance structure...

Information about risk preferences from investors is essential for modelling a wide range of quantitative finance applications. Valuable information related to preferences can be extracted from option prices through pricing kernels. In this paper, pricing kernels and their term structure are...

Traditionally volatility is viewed as a measure of variability, or risk, of an underlying asset. However recently investors began to look at volatility from a different angle. It happened due to emergence of a market for new derivative instruments - variance swaps. In this paper first we...