The empirical analysis of new warrant issues in the context of a structural model of the firm typically assumes the absence of debt and a perfect equity pricing model. We examine here an approach relaxing these two assumptions. The proposed approach develops simple analytical expressions for the...

This study combines the empirical estimation of a Double-Exponential Jump-Diffusion (DEJD) process for a CDS index and the use of estimated parameters to price options on the index. In the first step we find Maximum Likelihood estimates for the diffusion volatility, the Poisson jump frequencies,...

This paper studies the returns from investing in index options. Previous research documents significant average option returns, large CAPM alphas, and high Sharpe ratios, and concludes that put options are mispriced. We propose an alternative approach to evaluate the significance of option...

This article provides a mathematical and empirical investigation of the reasons for the presence of skewness and kurtosis in financial data. The results indicate that this phenomenon is triggered by higher-order moment dependencies in the data, such as asymmetric and conditional volatility....

This study compares the efficacy of Black–Scholes implied volatility (BSIV) with model-free implied volatility (MFIV) in providing volatility forecasts for 13 North American, European, and Asian stock market indexes: S&P 500 (United States), S&P/ASX 200 (Australia), S&P/TSX 60 (Canada), AEX...

The main goal of this paper is to better understand the behavior of credit spreads in the past and the potential risk of unexpected future credit spread changes. One important consideration to note regarding credit spreads is the fact that bond spreads contain a liquidity premium, which...

We consider several time series and for each of them, we fit an appropriate dynamic parametric model. This produces serially independent error terms for each time series. The dependence between these error terms is then modeled by a regime-switching copula. The EM algorithm is used for...

This paper presents a new approach to deriving default intensities from CDS or bond spreads that yields smooth intensity curves required e.g. for pricing or risk management purposes. Assuming continuous premium or coupon payments, the default intensity can be obtained by solving an integral...

A method to price American-style option contracts in a limited information framework is introduced. The pricing methodology is based on sequential Monte Carlo techniques, as presented in Doucet, de Freitas, and Gordon's text "Sequential Monte Carlo Methods in Practice", and the least-squares...

We introduce a new method to price American-style options on underlying investments governed by stochastic volatility (SV) models. The method does not require the volatility process to be observed. Instead, it exploits the fact that the optimal decision functions in the corresponding dynamic...