We consider the hedging of derivative securities when the price movement of the underlying asset can exhibit random jumps. Under a one factor Markovian setting, we derive a spanning relation between a long term option and a continuum of short term options. We then apply this spanning relation to...

The paper ”Exotic Option Pricing in Stochastic Volatility Levy Models and with Fractional Brownian Motion” aims on extending the restrictive Black-Scholes model by allowing volatility to evolve randomly. These models are used to price exotic derivatives and certificates. The first stochastic...

The behavioral origins of the stylized facts of financial returns have been addressed in a growing body of agent-based models of financial markets. While the traditional efficient market viewpoint explains all statistical properties of returns by similar features of the news arrival process, the...

Typically an investor incurs risk by issuing a contingent claim. She can try to reduce this risk by trading in the underlying asset according to a strategy which is in some sense appropriate. In an incomplete financial market there usually are several meaningful choices for the determination of...

Stochastic volatility (SV) models provide a means of tracking and forecasting the variance of financial asset returns. While SV models have a number of theoretical advantages over competing variance modelling procedures they are notoriously difficult to estimate. The distinguishing feature of...

This dissertation collects two papers regarding the econometric and economic theoryand testing of the predictability of asset returns. It is widely accepted that stockreturns are not only predictable but highly so. This belief is due to an abundanceof existing empirical literature fi nding often...

Affine term structure models (ATSMs) are known to have a trade-off in predicting future Treasury yields and fitting the time-varying volatility of interest rates. First, I empirically study the role of macroeconomic variables in simultaneously achieving these two goals under affine models. To...

There has been an on-going debate about choices of the most suitable model amongst avariety of model specifications and parameterizations. The first dissertation essay investigateswhether asymmetric leptokurtic return distributions such as Hansen’s (1994) skewed tdistributioncombined with...

This dissertation consists of three related chapters that study financial market volatility,jumps and the economic factors behind them. Each of the chapters analyzes adifferent aspect of this problem.The first chapter examines tests for jumps based on recent asymptotic results.Monte Carlo...

Recent empirical studies have argued that the temporal dependencies in "nancialmarket volatility are best characterized by long memory, or fractionally integrated, timeseries models. Meanwhile, little is known about the properties of the semiparametric inference procedures underlying much of...