Most dimension reduction methods based on nonparametric smoothing are highly sensitive to outliers and to data coming from heavy-tailed distributions. We show that the recently proposed methods by Xia et al. (2002) can be made robust in such a way that preserves all advantages of the original...

This paper offers a new method for estimation and forecasting of the linear and nonlinear time series when the stationarity assumption is violated. Our general local parametric approach particularly applies to general varying-coefficient parametric models, such as AR or GARCH, whose coefficients...

Implied trinomial trees (ITTs) present an analogous extension of trinomial trees proposed by Derman, Kani, and Chriss (1996). Like their binomial counterparts, they can fit the market volatility smile and actually converge to the same continuous limit as binomial trees. In addition, they allow...

Many of the concepts in theoretical and empirical finance developed over the past decades – including the classical portfolio theory, the Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model or the RiskMetrics variance-covariance approach to VaR – rest upon the assumption that asset returns follow a...

This paper is intended as a guide to building insurance risk (loss) models. A typical model for insurance risk, the so-called collective risk model, treats the aggregate loss as having a compound distribution with two main components: one characterizing the arrival of claims and another...

The Heston model stands out from the class of stochastic volatility (SV) models mainly for two reasons. Firstly, the process for the volatility is nonnegative and mean-reverting, which is what we observe in the markets. Secondly, there exists a fast and easily implemented semi-analytical...

The implied volatility became one of the key issues in modern quantitative finance, since the 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...