One of the roots of the recent global financial crisis has been seen in the design of subprime mortgage contract leading to high sensitivity of such type of loans to house price changes. The market of subprime loans, especially in the last years preceding the crisis, has been highly financed by...

Turbo-Certificates are one of the most popular structured equity products for private investors in Germany. They can be regarded as special forms of barrier options. The relation between the barrier level and the strike price is especially important for the design of these products. By using a...

We study the valuation of unit-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantees. Instead of solving an optimal stopping problem, we propose a more realistic approach accounting for policyholders’ rationality in exercising their surrender option. The valuation is conducted at the...

We study the effect of secondary markets on equity-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantees. The policyholders are assumed to be boundedly rational in giving up their contracts, and a proportion of policyholders will access the secondary markets instead of surrendering the...

In the framework of the classical Black and Scholes model of security market we present the explicit formulas of the minimal hedging portfolios for a number of reward processes of the ``classical'', lookback and Asian type. These results complement the solutions previously received by Mc~Kean,...

A term structure model with lognormal type volatility structure is proposed. The Heath, Jarrow and Morton (HJM) framework, coupled with the theory of stochastic evolution equations in infinite dimensions, is used to show that the resulting rates are well defined (they do not explode) and remain...

We develop a new approach to pricing and hedging contingent claims in incomplete markets. Mimicking as closely as possible in an incomplete markets framework the no--arbitrage arguments that have been developed in complete markets leads us to defining the concept of pseudo--arbitrage. Building...

Assuming constant interest rates Brennan and Schwartz (1976, 1979) obtained the rational insurance premium on an equity-linked insurance contract through the application of the theory of contingent claims pricing. Further considerations with deterministic interest rates have been discussed in...

This paper proposes a new explanation for the smile and skewness effects in implied volatilities. Starting from a microeconomic equilibrium approach, we develop a diffusion model for stock prices explicitly incorporating the technical demand induced by hedging strategies. This leads to a...

Let M(X) be a family of all equivalent local martingale measures for some locally bounded d-dimensional process X, and V be a positive process. Main result of the paper (Theorem 2.1) states that the process V is a supermartingale whatever Q in M(X), if and only if this process admits the...