Nonparametric methods for estimating the implied volatility surface or the implied volatility smile are very popular, since they do not impose a specific functional form on the estimate. Traditionally, these methods are two-step estimators. The first step requires to extract implied volatility...

Contingent claims with payoffs depending on finitely many asset prices are modeled as elements of a separable Hilbert space. Under fairly general conditions, including market completeness, it is shown that one may change measure to a reference measure under which asset prices are Gaussian and...

European call options are priced when the uncertainty driving the stock price follows the V. G. stochastic process (Madan and Seneta 1990). The incomplete markets equilibrium change of measure is approximated and identified using the log return mean. variance, and kurtosis. An exact equilibrium...

In a continuous-time representative investor economy with an exogenously given information process, asset prices are derived for alternative characterizations of the pricing kernel. In addition to the characterization of forward prices in a general representative investor economy a detailed...

The lack of a liquid market for implied correlations requires traders to estimate correlation matrices for pricing multi-asset equity options from historical data. To quantify the precision of these correlation estimates, we devise a block bootstrap procedure. The resulting bootstrap...

Asset price processes are completely described by information processes and investors´ preferences. In this paper we derive the relationship between the process of investors´ expectations of the terminal stock price and asset prices in a general continous time pricing kernel framework. To...