We study discretizations of polynomial processes using finite state Markov processes satisfying suitable moment matching conditions. The states of these Markov processes together with their transition probabilities can be interpreted as Markov cubature rules. The polynomial property allows us to...

The price of a European option can be computed as the expected value of the payoff function under the risk-neutral measure. For American options and path-dependent options in general, this principle cannot be applied. In this paper, we derive a model-free analytical formula for the implied...

We develop a novel contract design, the fed funds futures (FFF) variance futures, which reflects the expected realized basis point variance of an underlying FFF rate. The valuation of short-term FFF variance futures is completely model-independent in a general setting that includes the cases...

This paper investigates price jumps in commodity markets. We find that jumps are rare and extreme events but occur less frequently than in stock markets. Nonetheless, jump correlations across commodities can be high depending on the commodity sectors. Energy, metal and grains commodities show...

Empirical evidence suggests that fixed income markets exhibit unspanned stochastic volatility (USV), that is, that one cannot fully hedge volatility risk solely using a portfolio of bonds. While Collin-Dufresne and Goldstein (2002) showed that no two-factor Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (CIR) model can...

We review the notion of a linearity-generating (LG) process introduced by Gabaix (2007) and relate LG processes to linear-rational (LR) models studied by Filipovic, Larsson, and Trolle (2017). We show that every LR model can be represented as an LG process and vice versa. We find that LR models...

We introduce a novel class of credit risk models in which the drift of the survival process of a firm is a linear function of the factors. The prices of defaultable bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) are linear-rational in the factors. The price of a CDS option can be uniformly approximated by...

We introduce a novel stochastic volatility model where the squared volatility of the asset return follows a Jacobi process. It contains the Heston model as a limit case. We show that the joint density of any finite sequence of log returns admits a Gram-Charlier A expansion with closed-form...

We study American swaptions in the linear-rational (LR) term structure model introduced. The American swaption pricing problem boils down to an optimal stopping problem that is analytically tractable. It reduces to a free-boundary problem that we tackle by the local time-space calculus. We...

We derive analytic series representations for European option prices in polynomial stochastic volatility models. This includes the Jacobi, Heston, Stein-Stein, and Hull-White models, for which we provide numerical case studies. We find that our polynomial option price series expansion performs...