Four times a year, Eurodollar futures contracts are settled by cash to a final settlement price that is tied to spot three-month LIBOR. The LIBOR used in the settlement is determined by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange after conducting two surveys of major banks on the last hour of settlement....

We analyze the benefit to the insured of newly traded, innovative life insurance contracts. On a sequence of yearly reference days, the insured can choose between a guaranteed return (linked to the insurer's asset result) and a capped index participation. The cap is adjusted at the beginning of...

Following a trend of sustained and accelerated growth, the VIX futures and options market has become a closely followed, active and liquid market. The standard stochastic volatility models -- which focus on the modeling of instantaneous variance -- are unable to fit the entire term structure of...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the ability of the Dynamic Variance Gamma model, recently proposed by Bellini and Mercuri (2010), to evaluate option prices on the S&P500 index. We also provide a simple relation between the Dynamic Variance Gamma model and the Vix index. We use this...

Many efficient and accurate analytical methods for pricing American options now exist. However, while they can produce accurate option prices, they often do not give accurate critical stock prices. In this paper, we propose two new analytical approximations for American options based on the...

We consider a tractable affine stochastic volatility model that generalizes the seminal Heston (1993) model by augmenting it with jumps in the instantaneous variance process. In this framework, we consider options written on the realized variance, and we examine the impact of the distribution of...

Many efficient and accurate analytical methods for pricing American options now exist. However, while they can produce accurate option prices, they often do not give accurate critical stock prices. In this paper, we propose two new analytical approximations for American options based on the...

The quintic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck volatility model is a stochastic volatility model where the volatility process is a polynomial function of degree five of a single Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with fast mean reversion and large vol-of-vol. The model is able to achieve remarkable joint fits of the...

Forecasting based pricing of Weather Derivatives (WDs) is a new approach in valuation of contingent claims on nontradable underlyings. Standard techniques are based on historical weather data. Forward-looking information such as meteorological forecasts or the implied market price of risk (MPR)...

We conduct a comprehensive asset pricing analysis for the U.S. property/liability insurance industry using monthly data from 1988 to 2015. We find that state-of-the-art models such as the Fama and French (2015) five-factor model cannot explain the returns of property/liability insurance stocks...