Many of the concepts in theoretical and empirical finance developed over the past decades – including the classical portfolio theory, the Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model or the RiskMetrics variance-covariance approach to VaR – rest upon the assumption that asset returns follow a...

This paper is intended as a guide to building insurance risk (loss) models. A typical model for insurance risk, the so-called collective risk model, treats the aggregate loss as having a compound distribution with two main components: one characterizing the arrival of claims and another...

The Heston model stands out from the class of stochastic volatility (SV) models mainly for two reasons. Firstly, the process for the volatility is nonnegative and mean-reverting, which is what we observe in the markets. Secondly, there exists a fast and easily implemented semi-analytical...