The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) insures private sector defined benefit (DB) pension plans when an employer becomes insolvent and is unable to pay its pension liabilities. In principle, the insurance premiums collected by PBGC should be sufficient to cover potential losses; this...

Derivatives, especially equity and volatility options, contain valuable and oftentimes essential information for estimating stochastic volatility models. Absent strong assumptions, their typically highly nonlinear pricing dependence on the state vector prevents or at least severely impedes their...