The analysis of volatility in financial markets has become a first rank issue in modern financial theory and practice: Whether in risk management, portfolio hedging, or option pricing, we need to have a precise notion of the market's expectation of volatility. Much research has been done on the...

A primary goal in modelling the dynamics of implied volatility surfaces (IVS) aims at reducing complexity. For this purpose one fits the IVS each day and applies a principal component analysis using a functional norm. This approach, however, neglects the degenerated string structure of the...

A major application of rescaled adjusted range analysis (RS analysis) is the study of price fluctuations in financial markets. There, the value of the Hurst constant, H, in a time series may be interpreted as an indicator of the irregularity of the price of a commodity, currency or similar...

Based on daily VDAX data this paper analyzes the factors governing the movements of implied volatilities of options on the German stock index DAX. Using Principal Components Analysis over the sample period from 1996 to 1997, we derive common factors representing shift and curvature of the term...

We investigate the relationship between inflation and price variation using highly disaggregated, weekly price data for consumption goods recorded in Germany during 1995, a low-inflation period. We find a significant positive correlation between the rates of price change and price dispersion,...

We suggest a semi-nonparametric estimator for the call-option price surface. The estimator is a bivariate tensor-product B-spline. To enforce no-arbitrage constraints across strikes and expiry dates, we establish sufficient no-arbitrage conditions on the control net of the B-spline surface. The...

We evaluate the relevance of covariances in the transmission mechanism of variance spillovers across the US stock, US bond and gold markets from July 2003 to December 2012. For that purpose, we perform a comparative spillover analysis between a model that considers covariances and a model that...

We investigate the relationship between inflation and price variation using highly disaggregated, weekly price data for consumption goods recorded in Germany during 1995, a low-inflation period. We find a significant positive correlation between the rates of price change and price dispersion,...

We suggest a simple and general approach to fitting the discount curve under no-arbitrage constraints based on a penalized shape-constrained B-spline. Our approach accommodates B-splines of any order and fitting both under the L1 and the L2 loss functions. Simulations and an empirical analysis...