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...

Implicit in industry standard option pricing models is the expectation that roughly 25% of stocks with 60% consistent volatility will septuple within 10 years, an extraordinary rate of appreciation. The exceptionally high equilibrium anticipated returns for an improbably large percentage of high...

This paper proposes the sample path generation method for the stochastic volatility version of the CGMY process. We present the Monte-Carlo method for European and American option pricing with the sample path generation and calibrate model parameters to the American style S&P 100 index options...

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...

This paper examines the theoretically obtained prices with values based on temperature data in the Isle of Man and the UK. We have also seen that the simulated temperature trajectories do not appear to include entire seasons where the temperature remains cooler than normal. Anecdotally we have...

If the intensity parameter in a jump diffusion model is identically zero, then parameters characterizing the jump size density cannot be identified. In general, this lack of identification precludes consistent estimation of identified parameters. Hence, it should be standard practice to...

In this paper, we fill a gap in the financial econometrics literature, by developing a “jump test” for the null hypothesis that the probability of a jump is zero. The test is based on realized third moments, and uses observations over an increasing time span. The test offers an alternative...

While stochastic volatility models improve on the option pricing error when compared to the Black-Scholes-Merton model, mispricings remain. This paper uses mixed normal heteroskedasticity models to price options. Our model allows for significant negative skewness and time varying higher order...

In this paper we solve the discrete time mean-variance hedging problem when asset returns follow a multivariate autoregressive hidden Markov model. Time dependent volatility and serial dependence are well established properties of financial time series and our model covers both. To illustrate...