The aim of this thesis is to thoroughly study structural default models based on jump-diffusion processes. Jump-diffusion models were first proposed by Zhou (2001), who also showed that these models have several desirable properties, most important, positive short-term spreads. On the other...

The main aim of this thesis is the development of locally risk-minimizing hedging strategies for unit-linked life insurance contracts whose unit is modeled in a general Lévy-process financial market. It therefore merges the quite advanced and in recent years developed theory of...

We are interested in the concept of dynamic pricing of production capacity in a supply chain and in particular, understanding how the supply chain structure might affect the volatility of capacity prices. We find that supply chains with high capacity costs will experience high price volatility....

Es wird ein Ansatz und ein Algorithmus zur Lösung von stochastischen Stoppproblemen vorgestellt, der auf einer dualen Formulierung zum klassischen Lösungsansatz für Stoppprobleme mittels Variationsungleichungen basiert. Unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen kann man für diese duale Formulierung...

We study sequential decision making problems in cooperative systems where different agents with different information want to achieve a common objective. The sequential nature of the decision problem implies that all decisions can be arranged in a sequence such that the information available to...

The research presented in this thesis addresses different aspects of dynamic portfolio construction and portfolio risk measurement. It brings the research on dynamic portfolio optimization, replicating portfolio construction, dynamic portfolio risk measurement and volatility forecast together....

A regime-switching model for analysis of market integration has been developed that incorporates rate of trade information. An application of the methods to United States–China soybean trade demonstrates that the extended trade information allows better interpretation of market conditions....

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/29/09.

This paper produces evidence in support of the existence of common risk factors in the US andUK interest rate swap markets. Using a multivariate smooth transition autoregression (STVAR)framework, we show that the dynamics of the US and UK swap spreads are best described by aregime-switching...

This work develops asymptotically optimal dividend policies to maximize the expected present value of dividends until ruin. Compound Poisson processes with regime switching are used to model the surplus and the switching (a continuous-time controlled Markov chain) represents random environment...