We model the dynamics of asset prices and associated derivatives by consideration of the dynamics of the conditional probability density process for the value of an asset at some specified time in the future. In the case where the asset is driven by Brownian motion, an associated "master...

We introduce a novel semi-parametric estimator of the price of American options in a discrete time, Markovian framework. The estimator is based on a parametric specification of the stochasticdiscount factor and is non-parametric w.r.t. the historical dynamics of the state variables. The...

We present and compare two different approaches to conditional risk measures. One approach draws from convex analysis in vector spaces and presents risk measures as functions on Lp spaces, while the other approach utilizes module-based convex analysis where conditional risk measures are defined...

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First is to extend the notions of an n-dimensional semimartingale and its stochastic integral to a piecewise semimartingale of stochastic dimension. The properties of the former carry over largely intact to the latter, avoiding some of the pitfalls of in...

We study mean-variance hedging under portfolio constraints in a general semimartingale model. The constraints are formulated via predictable correspondences, meaning that the trading strategy is restricted to lie in a closed convex set which may depend on the state and time in a predictable way....

We solve the problem of mean-variance hedging for general semimartingale models via stochastic control methods. After proving that the value process of the associated stochastic control problem has a quadratic structure, we characterise its three coefficient processes as solutions of...

An equivalent sigma-martingale measure (EsigmaMM) for a given stochastic process S is a probability measure R equivalent to the original measure P such that S is an R-sigma-martingale. Existence of an EsigmaMM is equivalent to a classical absence-of-arbitrage property of S, and is invariant if...

We have analyzed the risks of possible development of bubbles in Switzerland's residential real estate market. The data employed in this work has been collected by comparis.ch, and carefully cleaned from duplicate records through a procedure based on supervised machine learning methods. The...

We propose an approach to the valuation of payoffs in general semimartingale models of financial markets where prices are nonnegative. Each asset price can hit 0; we only exclude that this ever happens simultaneously for all assets. We start from two simple, economically motivated axioms, namely...

This short review presents a selected history of the mutual fertilization between physics and economics, from Isaac Newton and Adam Smith to the present. The fundamentally different perspectives embraced in theories developed in financial economics compared with physics are dissected with the...