With the rapid development of option markets throughout the world, option pricing has become an important field in financial engineering. Among a variety of option pricing models, volatility of underlying asset is associated with risk and uncertainty, and hence is treated as one of the key...

As is well known, the classic Black-Scholes option pricing model assumes that returns follow Brownian motion. It is widely recognized that return processes differ from this benchmark in at least three important ways. First, asset prices jump, leading to non-normal return innovations. Second,...

We develop a simple robust test for the presence of continuous and discontinuous (jump) components in the price of an asset underlying an option. Our test examines the prices of at-the-money and out-of-the-money options as the option maturity approaches zero. We show that these prices converge...

We consider the hedging of derivative securities when the price movement of the underlying asset can exhibit random jumps. Under a one factor Markovian setting, we derive a spanning relation between a long term option and a continuum of short term options. We then apply this spanning relation to...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Life insurance and pension funds offer a wide range of products that are invested in a mix ofassets. These portfolios (II), underlying the products, are rebalanced back to predetermined fixedproportions on a regular basis. This is done by selling the better performing assets...

The inaccuracy of the Black-Scholes formula arises from two aspects: the formula is for European options while most real option contracts are American; the formula is based on the assumption that underlying asset prices follow a lognormal distribution while in the real world asset prices cannot...

The importance of weather as a production factor in agriculture is well established long time and a significant portion of yield fluctuations is caused by weather risks. Traditionally, farmers have tried to hedge against unfavorable weather using insurance, such as crop insurance. In recent...

Variabel verzinsliche Kundengeschäfte repräsentieren einen bedeutenden Teil der Aktiva und Passiva von Banken. Ihre Bewertung und Risikoanalyse ist sowohl für Banken als auch für die Bankenaufsicht anspruchsvoll, da insbesondere das Zusammenspiel zwischen Markt- und Produktzinsen sich als...

Implied volatility is one of the important topics in financial markets. Due to option data's characteristics, estimating implied volatility is a challenging task for both academia and industry. Dynamic Semiparametric Factor Model (DSFM) is method to model high-dimensional data with dynamic...

There has been an on-going debate about choices of the most suitable model amongst avariety of model specifications and parameterizations. The first dissertation essay investigateswhether asymmetric leptokurtic return distributions such as Hansen’s (1994) skewed tdistributioncombined with...