With increasing appreciation of the fact that stock return variance is stochastic and variance risk is heavily priced, the industry has created a series of variance derivative products to span variance risk. The variance swap contract is the most actively traded of these products. It pays at...

The challenge of international term structure models is to simultaneously account for the properties of interest rate term structures and foreign exchange rates within an arbitrage-free framework. We extend the quadratic term structure models proposed in Leippold and Wu (2002) to multiple...

For a given set of banks, which economic and financial scenarios will lead to big losses? How big can losses in such scenarios possibly get? These are the two central questions of macro stress tests. We believe that most current macro stress testing models have deficits in answering these...

We present a simple and operational yet rigorous framework that combines current methods of bank solvency stress tests with a description of fire sales. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework to the EBA stress testing exercise. Fire sales are described by an equilibrium model which...

This paper proposes a moment-matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite-state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete values and...

We analyze the pricing of risky income streams in a world with competitive security markets where investors are constrained by restrictions on possible portfolio holdings. We investigate how we can transfer concepts and pricing techniques from a world without frictions to such a more realistic...

Using futures data for the period 1990 - 2008, this paper finds evidence that expansionary monetary policy surprises tend to increase crude and heating oil prices, and contractionary monetary policy shocks increase gold and platinum prices. Our analysis uncovers substantial heterogeneity in the...

This paper proposes a robust approach to hedging and pricing in the presence of market imperfections such as market incompleteness and frictions. The generality of this framework allows us to conduct an in-depth theoretical analysis of hedging strategies for a wide family of risk measures and...