An investor trades a safe and several risky assets with linear price impact to maximize expected utility from terminal wealth. In the limit for small impact costs, we explicitly determine the optimal policy and welfare, in a general Markovian setting allowing for stochastic market, cost, and...

Replicating portfolios have recently emerged as an important tool in the life insurance industry, used for the valuation of companies' liabilities. This paper presents a replicating portfolio (RP) model for approximating life insurance liabilities as closely as possible. We minimize the L1 error...

The replicating portfolio (RP) approach to the calculation of capital for life insurance portfolios is an industry standard. The RP is obtained from projecting the terminal loss of discounted asset-liability cash flows on a set of factors generated by a family of financial instruments that can...

We establish the existence and characterization of a primal and a dual facelift - discontinuity of the value function at the terminal time - for utility maximization in incomplete semimartingale-driven financial markets. Unlike in the lower- and upper-hedging problems, and somewhat unexpectedly,...

We consider the problem of option hedging in a market with proportional transaction costs. Since super-replication is very costly in such markets, we replace perfect hedging with an expected loss constraint. Asymptotic analysis for small transaction costs is used to obtain a tractable model. A...

There are two major streams of literature on the modeling of financial bubbles: the strict local martingale framework and the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) financial bubble model. Based on a class of models that embeds the JLS model and can exhibit strict local martingale behavior, we clarify...

We show that the optimal asset allocation for an investor depends crucially on the theory with which the investor is modeled. For the same market data and the same client data different theories lead to different portfolios. The market data we consider is standard asset allocation data. The...

We compare asset allocations that are derived for cumulative prospect theory (CPT) based on two different methods: maximizing CPT along the mean {variance efficient frontier and maximizing CPT without this restriction. We find that with normally distributed returns, the difference between these...

We study the pricing and hedging of derivative securities with uncertainty about the volatility of the underlying asset. Rather than taking all models from a prespecified class equally seriously, we penalise less plausible ones based on their "distance" to a reference local volatility model. In...

This paper explores the incentives for mutual funds to trade with sibling funds affiliated with the same group. To this end, we construct a dataset of almost one million equity transactions and compare the pricing of trades crossed internally (cross-trades) with that of twin trades executed with...