Pricing and hedging structured credit products poses major challenges to financial institutions. This has become very clear during the recent credit crisis. This paper puts several valuation approaches through a crucial test: How did these models perform in one of the worst periods of economic...

This paper studies constrained portfolio problems that may involve constraints on the probability or the expected size of a shortfall of wealth or consumption. Our first contribution is that we solve the problems by dynamic programming, which is in contrast to the existing literature that...

This paper studies the life cycle consumption-investment-insurance problem of a family. The wage earner faces the risk of a health shock that significantly increases his probability of dying. The family can buy term life insurance with realistic features. In particular, the available contracts...

In this paper a portfolio problem is considered where trading in the risky asset is stopped if a state process hits a predefined barrier. This state process need not to be perfectly correlated with the risky asset. We give a representation result for the value function and provide a verification...

This paper studies the life cycle consumption-investment-insurance problem of a family. The wage earner faces the risk of a health shock that significantly increases his probability of dying. The family can buy term life insurance with realistic features. In particular, the available contracts...

This paper studies constrained portfolio problems that may involve constraints on the probability or the expected size of a shortfall of wealth or consumption. Our first contribution is that we solve the problems by dynamic programming, which is in contrast to the existing literature that...

In an incomplete market, we study the optimal consumption-portfolio decision of an investor with recursive preferences of Epstein–Zin type. Applying a classical dynamic programming approach, we formulate the associated Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation and provide a suitable verification...

This paper provides a unifying framework for the modeling of various types of credit risks such as contagion effects. We argue that Markov chains can efficiently be used to tackle these problems. However, our approach is not limited to pricing problems with contagion. Other applications include...