This review illustrates the interaction between law and finance in the particular case of the taxation of constructive sales. The focus is on the treatment of variable prepaid forward contracts and the rules regarding these instruments articulated by Revenue Ruling 2003-7 and the recent case...

This article reviews the literature on American-style derivatives. The presentation stresses some of the major developments in the field. The focus is on the determination of optimal exercise policies and the structure of derivatives’ prices. Illustrative examples highlight the complexity of...

This review provides formal definitions of the terms credit value adjustment (CVA) and debt value adjustment (DVA). Estimating these quantities requires modeling the probabilities of default and the loss given default, recognizing the dependence structure among all these inputs. In practice,...

This paper reviews the literature on credit risk models. Topics included are structural and reduced form models, incomplete information, credit derivatives, and default contagion. It is argued that reduced form models and not structural models are appropriate for the pricing and hedging of...

This paper reviews the term structure of interest rates literature relating to the arbitrage-free pricing and hedging of interest rate derivatives. Term structure theory is emphasized. Topics included are the HJM model, forward and futures contracts, the expectations hypothesis, and the pricing...

Volatility derivatives are a class of derivative securities where the payoff explicitly depends on some measure of the volatility of an underlying asset. Prominent examples of these derivatives include variance swaps and VIX futures and options. We provide an overview of the current market for...

This article surveys recent developments to estimate and test continuous-time models in finance using discrete observations on the underlying asset price or derivative securities' prices. Both parametric and nonparametric methods are described. All these methods share a common focus on the...

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both...

Credit default swaps (CDSs) are term insurance contracts written on traded bonds. This review studies the economics of CDSs using the economics of insurance literature as a basis for analysis. It is alleged that trading in CDSs caused the 2007 credit crisis, and therefore trading CDSs is an evil...

This article reviews the literature on commodities from the perspective of an investor. We re-examine some of the early papers in the literature using recent data and find that the empirical support for the theory of normal backwardation as an explanation for the commodity risk premium is weak...