This report uses the 2021 Global Opportunity Index and its different categories to provide an overview of Latin America's attractiveness to foreign investors, especially when compared to other emerging markets and developing economies (EMDE). It also offers an in-depth look at Latin America's...

The potential of algal biomass as a source of liquid and gaseous biofuels is a highly topical theme, but as yet there is no successful economically viable commercial system producing biofuel. However, the majority of the research has focused on producing fuels from microalgae rather than from...

For decades, farmers in the most marginalised regions of Mexico have depended for survival on the illicit cultivation of opium poppy for the US heroin market. In 2017 they could earn up to 20,000 pesos ($950-$1,050 dollars) per kilo of opium, which channelled around 19 billion pesos ($1 billion...

Classic treatments of both the opium industry and the international drug trade tend to leave out Mexico’s opium production. Yet the industry, which emerged in the 1920s, both fulfilled U.S. demands and shaped the Mexican narcotics trade.

Using the Gartner-Ellis theorem from large deviation theory, we characterize the leading-order behaviour of call option prices under the Heston model, in a new regime where the maturity is large and the log-moneyness is also proportional to the maturity. Using this result, we then derive the...

We show that if the discounted Stock price process is a continuous martingale, then there is a simple relationship linking the variance of the terminal Stock price and the variance of its arithmetic average. We use this to establish a model-independent upper bound for the price of a continuously...

In this paper we prove an approximate formula expressed in terms of elementary functions for the implied volatility in the Heston model. The formula consists of the constant and first order terms in the large maturity expansion of the implied volatility function. The proof is based on...

This note identifies a gap in the proof of Corollary 2.4 in [2], which arises because the essential smoothness of the family (Xt/t) can fail for the log-spot process X in the Heston model, and describes how to circumvent the issue by applying a standard argument from large deviation theory