The ground-breaking Black-Scholes-Merton model has brought about a generation of derivative pricing models that have been successfully applied in the financial industry. It has been a long standing puzzle that the structural models of credit risk, as an application of the same modeling paradigm,...

By reinterpreting the calibration of structural models, a reassessment of the importance of the input variables is undertaken. The analysis shows that volatility is the key parameter to any calibration exercise, by several orders of magnitude. To maximize the sensitivity to volatility, a simple...

Arbitrage and liquidity are interrelated. Liquidity facilitates arbitrageurs’ trading on deviations from the law of one price. However, whether arbitrage opportunity leads to an increase or decrease in liquidity depends on the cause of the deviation. A demand shock leads to greater liquidity,...

Since the collapse of the Metallgesellschaft AG due to hedging losses in 1993, energy practitioners have been concerned with the ability to hedge long-dated linear and non-linear oil liabilities with short-dated futures and options. This paper identifies a model-free non-parametric approach to...

In this paper, we evaluate American-style, path-dependent derivatives with an artificial intelligence technique. Specifically, we use swarm intelligence to find the optimal exercise boundary for an American-style derivative. Swarm intelligence is particularly efficient (regarding computation and...

The 2008 credit crisis changed the manner in which derivative trades are conducted. One of these changes is the posting of collateral in a trade to mitigate the counterparty credit risk. Another is the realization that banks are not risk-free and, as a result, cannot borrow at the risk-free rate...

It is argued that the growth in the breadth of option strikes traded after the financial crisis of 2008 poses difficulties for the use of Fourier inversion methodologies in volatility surface calibration. Continuous time Markov chain approximations are proposed as an alternative. They are shown...

This paper demonstrates that it is possible to improve significantly on the estimated call prices obtained with the regression and simulation-based least-squares Monte Carlo method by using put-call symmetry. The results show that, for a large sample of options with characteristics of relevance...

This paper develops and implements an equilibrium model of systemic risk. The model derives a systemic risk measure, loss beta, in characterizing all too-big-to-fail banks using a capital insurance equilibrium. By constructing each bank's loss portfolio with a recent accounting approach, we...

This paper provides global evidence supporting the hypothesis that expected return models are enhanced by the inclusion of variables that describe the evolution of book-to-market-changes in book value, changes in price, and net share issues. This conclusion is supported using data representing...