A key issue raised by the rapid growth of computerised algorithmic trading is how it responds in extreme situations. Using data on foreign exchange orders and transactions that includes identification of algorithmic trading, we find that this type of trading contributed to the deterioration of...

It is often argued that Black-Scholes (1973) values overstate the subjective value of stock options granted to risk-averse and under-diversified executives. We construct a “representative” Swiss executive and extend the certainty- equivalence approach presented by Hall and Murphy (2002) to...

Between September 6, 2011, and January 15, 2015, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) enforced a lower bound of 1.20 on the CHF/EUR exchange rate. In this paper, we view the SNB's commitment to this lower bound as a put option and use a latent likelihood estimation approach to infer (a) where the...

On 6 September 2011, a ceiling on the value of the Swiss franc was imposed, at CHF 1.2 per euro. With the continuous weakness of the euro area economy, this exchange rate limit was abandoned on 15 January 2015. This paper proposes a quasi-bounded process for the Swiss franc exchange rate...

Since its announcement made on Sept. 6, 2011, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) has been pursuing the goal of a minimum EUR/CHF exchange rate of 1.20, promising to intervene on currency markets to prevent the exchange rate from falling below this level. We use a compound option pricing approach to...

I test for the presence of asymmetric volatility in the Swiss Franc cross-rate futures markets. My investigation is based on a variant of the heterogeneous autoregressive volatility model, using daily realized variance and return series from 2004 through 2009. I find that a decline in futures...

A key contribution to the development of the traded market for longevity risk was the issuance of the Kortis bond, the world's first longevity trend bond, by Swiss Re in 2010. We analyse the design of the Kortis bond, develop suitable mortality models to analyse its payoff and discuss the key...