Binomial trees are very popular in both theory and applications of option pricing. As they often suffer from an irregular convergence behavior, improving this is an important task. We build upon a new version of the Edgeworth expansion for lattice models to construct new and quickly converging...

In this paper, we review pricing of the variable annuity living and death guarantees offered to retail investors in many countries. Investors purchase these products to take advantage of market growth and protect savings. We present pricing of these products via an optimal stochastic control...

This paper explores the stochastic collocation technique, applied on a monotonic spline, as an arbitrage-free and model-free interpolation of implied volatilities. We explore various spline formulations, including B-spline representations. We explain how to calibrate the different...

Phase-type (PH) distributions are defined as distributions of lifetimes of finite continuous-time Markov processes. Their traditional applications are in queueing, insurance risk, and reliability, but more recently, also in finance and, though to a lesser extent, to life and health insurance....

This paper proposes a data-driven approach, by means of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), to value financial options and to calculate implied volatilities with the aim of accelerating the corresponding numerical methods. With ANNs being universal function approximators, this method trains an...

We consider the optimal bail-out dividend problem with fixed transaction cost for a Lévy risk model with a constraint on the expected present value of injected capital. To solve this problem, we first consider the optimal bail-out dividend problem with transaction cost and capital injection and...

This paper explores the use of neural networks to reduce the computational cost of pricing and hedging variable annuity guarantees. Pricing these guarantees can take a considerable amount of time because of the large number of Monte Carlo simulations that are required for the fair value of these...

I document a sizeable bias that might arise when valuing out of the money American options via the Least Square Method proposed by Longstaff and Schwartz (2001). The key point of this algorithm is the regression-based estimate of the continuation value of an American option. If this regression...

While the main conceptual issue related to deposit insurances is the moral hazard risk, the main technical issue is inaccurate calibration of the implied volatility. This issue can raise the risk of generating an arbitrage. In this paper, first, we discuss that by imposing the no-moral-hazard...

As decarbonisation progresses and conventional thermal generation gradually gives way to other technologies including intermittent renewables, there is an increasing requirement for system balancing from new and also fast-acting sources such as battery storage. In the deregulated context, this...