The risk conscious investor is defined as the maximizer of a conservative valuation or dynamically a nonlinear expectation. Both the static and dynamic problems are addressed using distortions of tail probabilities or distortions of tail measures. The multivariate static problem is solved in the...

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...

We contrast two different asset pricing models, where the pricing kernel either (i) increases in the volatility dimension, reflecting investors' aversion to volatility, or (ii) could be non-monotonic in volatility, reflecting heterogeneity in investors' beliefs. The two models yield opposite...

We propose a model of volatility tail behavior, in which the pricing measure dominates the physical measure in both tails of the volatility distribution and, hence, the derived pricing kernel exhibits an increasing and decreasing region in the volatility dimension. The model features investors...

The Sato process associated with self decomposable laws at unit time is further generalized to an additive process with arbitrary innovation term structures. A second generalization to additive processes consistent with bilateral gamma marginal distributions is also made. The Sato process is a...

This study formalizes the departure between risk-neutral and physical index return volatilities, termed volatility spreads. Theoretically, the departure between risk neutral and physical index volatility is connected to the higher-order physical return moments and the parameters of the pricing...

We analyse the equilibrium asset pricing implications for an economy with single period return exposures to explicit non-Gaussian systematic factors, that may be both skewed and long-tailed, and Gaussian idiosyncratic components. Investors maximize expected exponential utility and equilibrium...

This paper proposes and empirically investigates a family of credit risk models driven by a two-factor structure for the short-interest rate and an additional third factor for firm-specific distress, using the reduced-form framework of Duffie and Singleton (1999). The set of firm-specific...

When the pricing kernel is U-shaped, then expected returns of claims with payout on the upside are negative for strikes beyond a threshold, determined by the slope of the U-shaped kernel in its increasing region, and have negative partial derivative with respect to strike in the increasing...

Asset returns are modeled by bilateral gamma processes with zero covariations. Covariances are then observed to be consequences of randomness in variations. Support vector machine regressions on prices are employed to model the implied randomness. The contributions of support vector machine...