Several studies incorporating estimated volatilities into option pricing formulas have appeared in the literature. However, the models described in these studies tend to perform quite poorly in out-of-sample tests. In particular, significant departures from the observed prices can be seen for...

We consider the behavior of the price of a continuously stored commodity, for which discounted price is a non-constant martingale, and thus not-predictable. We prove that the discounted price realization is within any given neighborhood of zero, with any given probability less than 1, beyond a...

This article analyzes the specifications of option pricing models based on time-changed Levy processes. We classify option pricing models based on (i) the structure of the jump component in the underlying return process, (ii) the source of stochastic volatility, and (iii) the specification of...

The aim of this work is to study the pricing problem for derivatives depending on two stocks driven by a bidimensional Lévy process. The main idea is to apply Girsanov's Theorem for Lévy processes, in order to reduce the posed problem to the pricing of a one Lévy driven stock in an auxiliary...

In this paper, we relate security returns in the thirty securities in the Dow Jones index to regime shifts in the market portfolio (S&P500) volatility. We model market volatility as a multiple-state Markov switching process of order one and estimate non-diversifiable security risk (beta) in the...

The fact that the expected payoffs on assets and call options are infinite under most log-stable distributions led Paul Samuelson and Robert Merton to conjecture that assets and derivatives could not be reasonably priced under these distributions, despite their many other attractive features....

We provide an analytical and flexible framework to evaluate incentive options. Our model not only considers vesting periods and trading and hedging restrictions on the holders, but also specifically includes provisions of reloading and resetting to capture the fact that firms tend to grant more...

Portfolio managers use index futures for a variety of reasons. Regardless of their motivation, they will keep a close eye on the relation between the futures and their stock portfolio returns. Whenever this relation is perceived to have changed, the manager will decide whether it is worthwhile...

It is generally argued that there is a link between commodity prices and stock levels and this paper provides a test of two economic models that attempt to explain commodity pricing, the stock-out model with two separate pricing states and the convenience yield model. Global stock levels are...