This paper discusses the estimation of models of the term structure of interest rates. After reviewing the term structure models, specifically the Nelson-Siegel Model and Affine Term- Structure Model, this paper estimates the terms structure of Treasury bond yields for the United States with...

Hong Kong SAR's government faces the dual challenges of volatile revenue and medium term spending pressures arising from a rapidly aging population. Age-related spending pressures raise long-run sustainability concerns, while revenue volatility creates risks to service provision, possibly...

In continuous time specifications, the prices of interest rate derivative securities depend crucially on the mean reversion parameter of the associated interest rate diffusion equation. This parameter is well known to be subject to estimation bias when standard methods like maximum likelihood...

In the early 70s Merton developed a theory based on economic arguments to study the properties of option and warrant prices. The main tool in his proofs was the portfolio dominance principle. In the context where the price of a contingent claim satisfies a partial differential equation we...

A barrier option is a financial derivative which includes an activation (or deactivation) clause within a standard vanilla option. For instance, a copper mining company could secure to sell in at least K dollars each ton of copper during the next year, by buying M European put options. However,...

Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is a technique that provides approximate solutions to a broad range of mathematical problems. A drawback of the method is its high computational cost, especially in a high-dimensional setting. Estimating the Tail Value-at-Risk for large portfolios or pricing basket...

In a discrete time option pricing framework, we compare the empirical performance of two pricing methodologies, namely the affine stochastic discount factor and the empirical martingale correction methodologies. Using a CAC 40 options dataset, the differences are found to be small : the higher...

A restriction to nonnegative wealth is sufficient to preclude all arbitrage opportunities in financial models that have risk neutral probabilities that are valid for all simple strategies. Imposing nonnegative wealth does not constrain agents from making the choice they would make under the...

While large inflows of capital into Southeastern Europe (SEE) have raised incomes, this has increased vulnerability to financial risks, which, if realized, can lead to costly adjustments. Traditional vulnerability indicators in SEE have reached levels that in other countries have not been...

A new methodology is proposed to estimate theoretical prices of financial contingent-claims whose values are dependent on some other underlying financial assets. In the literature the preferred choice of estimator is usually maximum likelihood (ML). ML has strong asymptotic justification but is...