Policy counterfactuals based on estimated structural VARs routinely suggest that bringing Alan Greenspan back in the 1970s’ United States would not have prevented the Great Inflation. We show that a standard policy counterfactual suggests that the Bundesbank–which is near-universally...

A contingent claims valuation model which allows to highlight the implications of program trading in spot markets for the pricing of European-style foreign currency options and for the volatility strike structure implicit in these contracts is devoloped. The curvature of the volatility strike...

Tests for the existence and the sign of the volatility risk premium are often based on expected option hedging errors. When the hedge is performed under the ideal conditions of continuous trading and correct model specification, the sign of the premium is the same as the sign of the mean hedging...

This paper deals with the superhedging of derivatives on incomplete markets, i.e. with portfolio strategies which generate payoffs at least as high as that of a given contingent claim. The simplest solution to this problem is in many cases a static superhedge, i.e. a buy-and-hold strategy...

We introduce a Nelson-Siegel type interest rate term structure model with the underlying yield factors following autoregressive processes revealing time-varying stochastic volatility. The factor volatilities capture risk inherent to the term struc- ture and are associated with the time-varying...

In this paper, we review the most common specifications of discrete-time stochastic volatility (SV) models and illustrate the major principles of corresponding Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based statistical inference. We provide a hands-on ap proach which is easily implemented in empirical...