Life insurers are exposed to interest rate risk, and their liability side is typically more sensitive to interest rate changes than their asset side. This paper develops an accounting-based measure of interest rate sensitivity. My approach uses the coexistence of historical cost and market value...

In this paper we apply statistical inference techniques to build neural network models which are able to explain the prices of call options written on the German stock index DAX. By testing for the explanatory power of several input variables serving as network inputs, some insight into the...

Various empirical studies have shown that the time-varying volatility of asset returns can be described by GARCH (generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) models. The corresponding GARCH option pricing model of Duan (1995) is capable of depicting the smile-effect which often...