Recently there has been some interest in the credit risk literature in models which involve stopping times related to excursions. The classical Black-Scholes-Merton-Cox approach postulates that default may occur, either at or before maturity, when the firm's value process falls below a critical...

We derive discrete markov chain approximations for continuous state equilibrium term structure models. The states and transition probabilities of the markov chain are chosen effciently according to a quadrature rule as in Tauchen and Hussey (1991). Quadrature provides a simple yet method which...

Prices of currency options commonly differ from the Black-Scholes formula along two dimensions: implied volatilities vary by strike price (volatility smiles) and maturity (implied volatility of at­the­money options increases, on average, with maturity). We account for both using Gram­Charlier...

We document a surprising pattern in market prices of S&P 500 index options. When implied volatilities are graphed against a standard measure of moneyness, the implied volatility smirk does not flatten out as maturity increases up to the observable horizon of two years. This behavior contrasts...

If pricing kernels are assumed non-negative then the inverse problem of finding the pricing kernel is well-posed. The constrained least squares method provides a consistent estimate of the pricing kernel. When the data are limited, a new method is suggested: relaxed maximization of the relative...

This note derives new expressions for the moments of the average of values taken by Wiener paths at an arbitrary number, N, of discrete times. The expressions are closed summations, which entail only the N-th powers of, and the successive differences between, the moments of the lognormal finite...

A lattice-based method is advanced for evaluating functionals of sequences of path-wise values of a lattice's state variable. For the Asian call valuations in this paper, the lattices discretely replicate the stochastic future states of conventionally prescribed, lognormally distributed, equity...

The twin brothers Libor Market and Gaussian HJM models are investigated. A simple exotic option, floor on composition, is studied. The same explicit approach is used for both models. Using an approximation the LLM price is obtained without Monte Carlo simulation. The results of the approximation...

Binomial lattices are sequences of discrete distributions commonly used to approximate the future value states of a financial claim, such as a stock price, when the instantaneous rate of return is assumed to be governed by a Wiener diffusion process. In that case, both pedagogical and...