The Enron Corporation went from a $65 billion dollar market capitalization to bankruptcy in just 16 months. Using statistical techniques for extracting the implied probability distributions built into option prices, I examine the market's expectation of Enron's risk of collapse. I find that the...

This paper provides regime-switching stochastic volatility extensions of the LIBOR market model. First, the instantaneous forward LIBOR volatility is modulated by a continuous time homogeneous Markov chain. In a second parameterization, the volatility is modelled by a square root process with a...

In this paper, we extend the earlier results of Jeanblanc and Valchev (2003) in the single name case to the case of multiple defaults of the issuers in a concentrated industry or homo- geneous bond market. We provide solutions for the pairwise default correlations and credit spreads in an...

The 1987 market crash was associated with a dramatic and permanent steepening of the implied volatility curve for equity index options, despite minimal changes in aggregate consumption. We explain these events within a general equilibrium framework in which expected endowment growth and economic...

A regime switching model in continuous time is introduced where a variety of jumps are allowed in addition to the diffusive component. The characteristic function of the process is derived in closed form, and is subsequently employed to create the likelihood function. In addition, standard...

This paper presents a new numerical method for pricing American call options when the volatility of the price of the underlying stock is stochastic. By exploiting a log-linear relationship of the optimal exercise boundary with respect to volatility changes, we derive an integral representation...

Financial models are largely used in option pricing. These physical models capture several salient features of asset price dynamics. The pricing performance can be significantly enhanced when they are combined with nonparametric learning approaches, that empirically learn and correct pricing...

We show that a simple equilibrium model with uncertain growth is able to simultaneously generate patterns in implied volatility and risk aversion that are similar to the ones observed in the data. In addition, the model produces an implied pricing kernel that is increasing for particular levels...

In this article, we describe the various sorts of American Parisian options and propose valuation formulae. Although there is no closed-form valuation for these products in the non perpetual case, we have been able to reformulate their price as a function of the exercise frontier. In the...

Institutional but also private investors have often limited flexibility in timing their investment decision. Therefore, they look for investments that would ideally be independent of the timing decision. We introduce a new class of derivative products whose payoff is linked to the trend of the...