We consider a simple single period economy in which agents invest so as to maximize expected utility of terminal wealth. We assume the existence of three asset classes, namely a riskless asset (the bond), a single risky asset (the stock), and European options of all strikes (derivatives). In...

In this paper, we show that the calibration to an implied volatility surface and the pricing of contingent claims can be as simple in a jump-diffusion framework as in a diffusion framework. Indeed, after defining the jump densities as those of diffusions sampled at independent and exponentially...

We define the class of local Levy processes. These are Levy processes time changed by an inhomogeneous local speed function. The local speed function is a deterministic function of time and the level of the process itself. We show how to reverse engineer the local speed function from traded...

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...