Locally-capped products are an economically important and poorly understood category of structured financial products. These contracts combine a guaranteed payoff with a bonus equal to some accumulation of the capped periodic returns of a reference portfolio. We show that these products often...

It is now known that the very impressive investment returns generated by Bernie Madoff were based on a sophisticated Ponzi scheme. Madoff claimed to use a split-strike conversion strategy. This strategy consists of a long equity position plus a long put and a short call. In this paper we examine...

We develop a model of portfolio choice to nest the views of Keynes---who advocates concentration in a few familiar assets---and Markowitz---who advocates diversification across assets. We rely on the concepts of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion to formalize the idea of investor's...

We develop a model of portfolio choice capable of nesting the views of Keynes, advocating concentration in a few familiar assets, and Markowitz, advocating diversification across all available assets. In the model, the return distributions of risky assets are ambiguous, and investors are averse...

We show that if a particular lead-lag relation exists between the option and stock markets, the implied volatility in option prices can be biased depending on the level of the true volatility. The higher the true volatility, the more upward (downward) biased the implied volatility will be, if...

The paper develops an efficient Monte Carlo method to price discretely monitored Parisian options based on a control variate approach. The paper also modifies the Parisian option design by assuming the option is exercised when the barrier condition is met rather than at maturity. We obtain...

This paper develops a unifying framework for allocating the aggregate capital of a financial firm to its business units. The approach relies on an optimisation argument, requiring that the weighted sum of measures for the deviations of the business unit's losses from their respective allocated...

We consider the problem of determining appropriate solvency capital requirements for an insurance company or a financial institution. We demonstrate that the subadditivity condition that is often imposed on solvency capital principles can lead to the undesirable situation where the shortfall...