All too often, the concept of risk-neutral probabilities in mathematical finance is poorly explained, and misleading statements are made. The aim of this paper is to provide an intuitive understanding of risk-neutral probabilities, and to explain in an easily accessible manner how they can be...

Property-casualty (P&C) insurers are exposed to rare but severe natural disasters. This paper analyzes the relation between catastrophe risk and the implied volatility smile of insurance stock options. We find that the slope is significantly steeper compared to non-financials and other financial...

This paper proposes a risk measure, based on first-passage probability, which reflects intra-horizon risk in jump models with finite or infinite jump activity. Our empirical investigation shows, first, that the proposed risk measure consistently exceeds the benchmark Value-at-Risk (VaR). Second,...

Inspired by the theory of social imitation (Weidlich 1970) and its adaptation to financial markets by the Coherent Market Hypothesis (Vaga 1990), we present a behavioral model of stock prices that supports the overreaction hypothesis. Using our dynamic stock price model, we develop a two factor...

We model the dynamics of asset prices and associated derivatives by consideration of the dynamics of the conditional probability density process for the value of an asset at some specified time in the future. In the case where the asset is driven by Brownian motion, an associated "master...

The art market has seen boom and bust during the last years and, despite the downturn, has received more attention from investors given the low interest environment following the financial crisis. However, participation has been reserved for a few investors and the hedging of exposures remains...

We analyze the impact of funding costs and margin requirements on prices of index options traded on the CBOE. We propose a model that gives upper and lower bounds for option prices in the absence of arbitrage in an incomplete market with differential borrowing and lending rates. We show that...

Market option prices in last 20 years confirmed deviations from the Black and Scholes (BS) models assumptions, especially on the BS implied volatility. Implied binomial trees (IBT) models capture the variations of the implied volatility known as "volatility smile". They provide a discrete...

This paper introduces a new technique to infer the risk-neutral probability distribution of an asset from the prices of options on this asset. The technique is based on using the trading volume of each option as a proxy of the informativeness of the option. Not requiring the implied probability...