We develop a singular stochastic control model for pricing variable annuities with the guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefit. This benefit promises to return the entire initial investment, with withdrawals spread over the term of the contract, irrespective of the market performance of the...

Financial derivatives commonly contain pre-mature termination clauses, which are embedded rights held by the holder or writer. Well known examples of these stopping rights include the early exercise right in American options, callable right in callable securities and pre-payment right in...

We examine the early exercise policies and pricing behaviors of one-asset American options with lookback payoff structures. The classes of option models considered include floating strike lookback options, Russian options, fixed strike lookback options and pricing model of protection fund. In...

When an American warrant or convertible bond is called by its issuer, the holder is usually given a notice period to decide either selling the derivative back to the issuer at the call price or exercising the conversion right. Several earlier papers have shown that such notice period requirement...

A general framework is developed to analyze the optimal stopping (exercise) regions of American path dependent options with either Asian feature or lookback feature. We examine the monotone properties of the option values and stopping regions with respect to the interest rate, dividend yield and...

Upon the exercise of an employee stock option, the embedded reload provision entitles the holder to receive additional units of new options from the employer. The number of units of new options received is equal to the number of shares tendered as payment of strike and the new strike is set at...

Reset clauses on the strike price and maturity date are commonly found in derivative contracts, like insurance segregated funds, bonds and executive warrants. We analyze the optimal reset policy adopted by the holder of an option that possesses the reset rights on the strike price and date of...

The reload provision in an employee stock option entitles its holder to receive one new (reload) option from the employer for each share tendered as payment of strike upon the exercise of the stock option. The number of reloads allowed can be finite or infinite. The shout feature in a call...

A knock-in American option under a trigger clause is an option contract in which the option holder receives an American option conditional on the underlying asset price breaching certain trigger level (or called barrier level). We present closed form valuation formulas for knock-in American...