This book explains key financial concepts, mathematical tools and theories of mathematical finance. It is organized in four parts. The first brings together a number of results from discrete-time models. The second develops stochastic continuous-time models for the valuation of financial assets...

This article brings new insights on the role played by (implied) volatility on the WTI crude oil spot price. An increase in the volatility subsequent to an increase in the oil price (i.e. inverse leverage effect) remains the dominant effect as it might reflect the fear of oil consumers to face...

In the last forty years, the theory of financial markets has become a growing field of interest for academics as well as for practitioners. We present here an overview of the main topics.

This article documents the conditional and unconditional distributions of the realized volatility for the 2008 futures contract in the European climate exchange (ECX), which is valid under the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS). Realized volatility measures from naive, kernel-based and...

This article inves tigates the time evolution of the integra tion of derivative markets through the graph-theory. We focus on three categor ies of underlying as sets : energy and agricultural products , as well as financial assets . Integration is seen as a necessary condition for systemic risk...

In this paper, we are dealing with financial high frequency data; any time an order reaches the market, any time a cancellation or transaction occurs, a new record is made, ending up with a huge amount of data. Hence the time interval between two events is not fixed, forbidding the use of...

The lack of success of past strategies in reducing poverty has raised doubts as to whether these strategies were really an appropriate response to the needs of impoverished populations. Bearing in mind the aims of the new generation of development programmes to "empower" the poor, representative...