Mean reversion, stochastic volatility, convenience yield and presence of jump clustering are well documented salient features of commodity markets, where Asian options are very popular. We propose a model which takes into account all these stylized features. We first state our model under the...

Securitization of the rainfall risk involves pooling of the rainfall contingent insurance policies to issue financial instruments in the capital markets to transfer the rainfall risk from the insurers to the investors. Low income households, especially in the developing countries like India...

Low income households, especially in the developing countries could suffer losses due to weather related events such as drought, hurricanes, floods etc. Such losses could cast a household into a chronic poverty cycle - a poverty trap from which the household may find it difficult to re-emerge....

I develop a noisy rational expectations equilibrium model with a continuum of states and a full set of options that render the market complete. I show a major difference in equilibrium behaviour between models with constant absolute risk aversion (CARA) and non-CARA preferences. First, when...

We examine whether the option market leads the stock market with respect to positive in addition to negative price discovery. We document that out-of-themoney (OTM) option prices, which determine the Risk-Neutral Skewness (RNS) of the underlying stock return's distribution, can embed positive...

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...

Empirical evidence shows that, in equity options markets, the slope of the skew is largely independent of the volatility level. Single-factor stochastic volatility models are not flexible enough to account for the stochastic behavior of the skew. On the other hand, multifactor stochastic...

With the success of variable annuities, insurance companies are piling up large risks in terms of both equity and fixed income assets. These risks should be properly modeled as the resulting dynamic hedging strategy is very sensitive to the modeling assumptions. The current literature has been...

Basket options are among the most popular products of the new generation of exotic options. This attraction is explained by the fact that they can efficiently and simultaneously hedge a wide variety of intrinsically different financial risks. They are flexible enough to include all the risks...

Replacing equity return (as in the equity risk premium) with returns on an arbitrary contingent claim, we obtain a new class of economic risk premiums to impose upon candidate models. These risk premiums reflect the distance between the physical and risk-neutral moments for asset returns, can be...