ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis, we propose to use Levy processes to model the dynamics of asset prices. Inthe first part, we deal with single asset options and model the log stock prices with a Levyprocess. We employ pure jump Levy processes of infinite activity, in particular variancegamma...

The increase in the use of copulas has introduced implementation issues for both practitioners and researchers. One of the issues is to obtain a copula function for a given set of data. The most common approaches for the estimation of the parameters of the copula functions have been the Maximum...

Due to increasing interest in sustainable development, today s engineer is often tasked with designing systems that are environmentally benign over their entire life cycles. Unfortunately, environmental assessments commonly suffer from significant uncertainty due to lack of information,...

In this thesis we consider two comparative statics questions of changes in risk. The first question concerns situations where an individual faces some risk and has no control over the uncertain environment. In these situations we ask what kind of changes in risk will cause the individual's...

The first part of the dissertation concerns financial volatility models. Financial volatility has some stylized facts, such as excess kurtosis, volatility clustering and leverage effects. A good volatility model should be able to capture all these stylized facts. Among the volatility models,...

In this dissertation we propose a new model which captures observed features of asset prices. The model reproduces the skewness and fat tails of asset returns by introducing a discretized variance gamma process as the driving innovation process, in addition to a double gamma process to reflect...

Applying statistical tools to help understand business processes and make informed business decisions has attracted enormous amount of research interests in recent years. In this dissertation, we develop and apply data mining techniques to two sources of data, online bidding data for eBay and...

In this paper, we introduce DSPMD, discretely sampled process with pre-specified marginals and pre-specified dependence, and SRLMD, series representation for Levy process with pre-specified marginals and pre-specified dependence. In the DSPMD for Levy processes, some regular copula can be...