Thesis (PhD (Statistics and Actuarial Science))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011.

Valuing American options is a central problem in option pricing since the early-exercise feature is very common among financial or insurance derivatives products. For high-dimensional American options, Monte Carlo simulation is generally regarded as the only viable approach to price them, and...

Incluye bibliografía ; In this paper I consider a model for the heterogeneity and dynamics of the conditional mean and the conditional variance of standarized individual wages. In particular, I propose a dynamic panel data model with individual effects both in the mean and in a conditional ARCH...

En este trabajo se estudia la estimación de modelos no lineales de datos de panel que incluyen efectos fijos múltiples. La estimación de estos modelos es complicada tanto por la dificultad de estimar especificaciones con miles de coeficientes, como por el problema de los parámetros...

The research analyzes aspects of the spot forex intraday trading and the existing models based on macro fundamentals or describing market microstructure. Most of analysis is done on high frequency data, over an extensive period and on 70 currency pairs. A hybrid model based on microstructure...

Financial processes may possess long memory and their probability densities may display heavy tails. Many models have been developed to deal with this tail behaviour, which reflects the jumps in the sample paths. On the other hand, the presence of long memory, which contradicts the efficient...

One of the major points of contention in studying and modeling financial returns is whether or not the variance of the returns is finite or infinite (sometimes referred to as the Bachelier-Samuelson Gaussian world versus the Mandelbrot stable world). A different formulation of the question asks...