Asset price dynamics are taken to be accumulations of surprise jumps in the logarithm of prices. A Markov pure jump model is formulated on making variance gamma parameters deterministic functions of the price level. Estimation is done by matrix exponentiation of the transition rate matrix for a...

Statistical theory has been relatively absent in the exercise of estimating parameters of an option pricing model from cross-sectional data at a fixed point of calendar time. The cross-sectional data typically consists of prices for options at various strikes and maturities at market close. The...

Noting that risk neutral distributions are estimated by minimizing the squared deviations between market and model option prices we consider using option payoff moments in estimating distributional parameters from a sample of observations. It is observed, in particular when compared to maximum...

Stochastic processes arising in the description of the risk-neutral evolution of equity prices are reviewed. Starting with Brownian motion, I review extensions to Lévy and Sato processes. These processes have independent increments; the former are homogeneous in time, whereas the latter are...

Three processes reflecting persistence of volatility are initially formulated by evaluating three Lévy processes at a time change given by the integral of a mean-reverting square root process. The model for the mean-reverting time change is then generalized to include non-Gaussian models that...

Options paying the product of put and/or call option payouts at different strikes on two underlying assets are observed to synthesize joint densities and replicate differentiable functions of two underlying asset prices. The pricing of such options is undertaken from three perspectives. The...

It is argued that the growth in the breadth of option strikes traded after the financial crisis of 2008 poses difficulties for the use of Fourier inversion methodologies in volatility surface calibration. Continuous time Markov chain approximations are proposed as an alternative. They are shown...

Three processes reflecting persistence of volatility are initially formulated by evaluating three Lévy processes at a time change given by the integral of a mean-reverting square root process. The model for the mean-reverting time change is then generalized to include non-Gaussian models that...

This paper extends the known results on the equivalence between market completeness and the uniqueness of martingale measures for finite asset economies, to the infinite asset case. Our arguments employ results from the theory of linear operators between locally convex topological vector spaces....