This paper sets up a model for the valuation of traditional participating life insurance policies. These claims are characterized by their explicit interest rate guarantees and by various embedded option elements, such as bonus and surrender options. Owing to the structure of these contracts,...

In this paper the performance of locally risk-minimizing hedge strategies for European options in stochastic volatility models is studied from an experimental as well as from an empirical perspective. These hedge strategies are derived for a large class of diffusion-type stochastic volatility...

It is impossible to discriminate between the commonly used stochastic volatility models of Heston, log-normal, and 3-over-2 on the basis of exponentially weighted averages of daily returns-even though it appears so at first sight. However, with a 5-min sampling frequency, the models can be...

We investigate the state dependence of the variance of the instantaneous variance of the S&P 500 index empirically. Time-series analysis of realized variance over a 20-year period shows strong evidence of an elasticity of variance of the variance parameter close to that of a log-normal model,...