Unlike European-type derivative securities, there are no simple analytic valuation formulas for American options, even when the underlying asset price has constant volatility. The early exercise feature considerably complicates the valuation of American contracts. The strategy taken in this...

In this paper, we consider American option contracts when the underlying asset has stochastic dividends and stochastic volatility. We provide a full discussion of the theoretical foundations of American option valuation and exercise boundaries. We show how they depend on the various sources of...

In this paper, we investigate whether seasonal adjustment procedures are, at least approximately, linear data transformations. This question is important with respect to many issues including estimation of regression models with seasonally adjusted data. We focus on the X-11 program and first...

We introduce a new approximation method for the distribution of functions of random variables that are real-valued. The approximation involves moment matching and exploits properties of the class of normal inverse Gaussian distributions. In the paper we examine the how well the different...

In this paper we propose a generic procedure for estimating and pricing options in the context of stochastic volatility models using simultaneously the fundamental price and a set of option contracts. We appraise univariate and multivariate estimation of the model in terms of pricing and hedging...

Many continuous time term structure of interest rate models assume a factor structure where the drift and volatility functions are affine functions of the state variable process. These models involve very specific parametric choices of factors and functional specifications of the drift and...

Understanding the dynamics of interest rates and the term structure has important implications for issues as diverse as real economic activity, monetary policy, pricing of interest rate derivative securities and public debt financing. Our paper follows a longstanding tradition of using factor...

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new class of jump diffusions which feature both stochastic volatility and random intensity jumps. Previous studies have focussed primarily on pure jump processes with constant intensity and log-normal jumps or constant jump intensity combined with a one...

We show that using data which are properly available in real time when assessing the sensitivity of asset prices to economic news leads to different empirical findings that when data availability and timing issues are ignored. We do this by focusing on a particular example, namely Chen, Roll and...

One fundamental issue in the study of market microstructures is that of price discovery. While most existing studies focus on the trading period, little is known whether and how much the non-trading period contributes to the price discovery. This paper offers a new perspective on the price...