Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) were among the driving forces of the rapid growth of the market for credit derivatives in recent years. Possibly the most popular model beside the Gaussian copula for pricing CDO tranches is the Random-Factor-Loading-Model of Andersen and Sidenius...

The price of a European option can be computed as the expected value of the payoff function under the risk-neutral measure. For American options and path-dependent options in general, this principle cannot be applied. In this paper, we derive a model-free analytical formula for the implied...

The duality between the robust (or equivalently, model independent) hedging of path dependent European options and a martingale optimal transport problem is proved. The financial market is modeled through a risky asset whose price is only assumed to be a continuous function of time. The hedging...

Given bid-offer quotes for a set of listed vanilla options, a fundamental need of option market makers is to interpolate and extrapolate the available quotes to a full arbitrage-free surface. We propose a methodology which directly controls the trade-off between smoothness and bid-offer...

I introduce dynamic option trading and non-linear views into the classical portfolio selection problem. The optimal dynamic option portfolio is characterized explicitly in terms of its expected sensitivities (Greeks) and the role of the mean-variance effi cient portfolio is played by the "Greek...

This paper shows that the VIX market contains information on the variance of the S&P 500 returns, which is not already spanned by the S&P 500 market. We estimate a flexible affine model based on a joint time series of underlying indexes and option prices on both markets. We find that including...

Supported by empirical examples, this paper provides a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set for the estimation of the empirical pricing kernel and, more in general, for the validity of the fundamental theorems of asset pricing. While inferring the...

A new method to retrieve the risk-neutral probability measure from observed option prices is developed and a closed form pricing formula for European options is obtained by employing a modified Gram-Charlier series expansion, known as the Gauss-Hermite expansion. This expansion converges for...

We propose an approach to the valuation of payoffs in general semimartingale models of financial markets where prices are nonnegative. Each asset price can hit 0; we only exclude that this ever happens simultaneously for all assets. We start from two simple, economically motivated axioms, namely...

The article presents a Bayesian nonparametric approach to model the Pricing Kernel (PK), defined as the present value of the ratio between the risk neutral density, q, and a modified physical density, p*. The risk neutral density is estimated from option data and the modified physical density is...