The aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of alternative frameworks for the fair valuation of life insurance contracts with a predominant financial component, in terms of impact on the market consistent price of the contracts, the embedded options, and the capital requirements for the...

Vanilla (standard European) options are actively traded on many underlying asset classes, such as equities, commodities and foreign exchange (FX). The market quotes for these options are typically used by exotic options traders to calibrate the parameters of the (risk-neutral) stochastic process...

We discuss a Levy multivariate model for financial assets which incorporates jumps, skewness, kurtosis and stochastic volatility. We use it to describe the behaviour of a series of stocks or indexes and to study a multi-firm, value-based default model. Starting from an independent Brownian...

In this paper we offer a systematic survey and comparison of the Esscher martingale transform for linear processes, the Esscher martingale transform for exponential processes, and the minimal entropy martingale measure for exponential Levy models, and present some new results in order to give a...

We analyse the equilibrium asset pricing implications for an economy with single period return exposures to explicit non-Gaussian systematic factors, that may be both skewed and long-tailed, and Gaussian idiosyncratic components. Investors maximize expected exponential utility and equilibrium...

The aim of this paper is to introduce the notion of symmetry in a Levy market. This notion appears as a particular case of a general known relation between prices of put and call options, of both the European and the American type, which is also reviewed in the paper, and that we call put-call...

Importance sampling is a promising variance reduction technique for Monte Carlo simulation-based derivative pricing. Existing importance sampling methods are based on a parametric choice of the proposal. This article proposes an algorithm that estimates the optimal proposal non-parametrically...

In this paper we propose a jump-diffusion Libor model with jumps in a high-dimensional space (m) and test a stable non-parametric calibration algorithm that takes into account a given local covariance structure. The algorithm returns smooth and simply structured Levy densities, and penalizes...

In this paper we present a Markov-Functional hybrid interest rate/foreign exchange model that allows calibration to given market volatility surfaces in both dimensions simultaneously. This is achieved by extending the approach introduced by Fries and Rott by a functional for the foreign exchange...