Many of the concepts in theoretical and empirical finance developed over thepast decades - including the classical portfolio theory, the Black-Scholes-Mertonoption pricing model and the RiskMetrics variance-covariance approach toValue at Risk (VaR) - rest upon the assumption that asset returns...

Options are financial derivatives that, conditional on the price of an underlyingasset, constitute a right to transfer the ownership of this underlying. Morespecifically, a European call and put options give their owner the right to buyand sell, respectively, at a fixed strike price at a given...

The doctoral thesis of Louis Bachelier (1900) is widely considered as the seminal work inoption pricing theory. However, only a few years later, 1908, Vinzenz Bronzin, who wasa professor of actuarial science at the Accademia di Commercio e Nautica in Trieste,published a booklet (in German) on...

We investigate the impact of options listings on the variance of the underlyingstock returns in the Swiss equity market using a non-parametric approach.The emergence of multiple share categories in most Swiss firms,combined with the fact that (listed) options are typically not introduced onall...

In this note we present a simple method to include the no-arbitrage condition into thederivation of conditional densities using the principle of maximum entropy. For the case ofidentically and independently distributed returns, we easily derive that the whole processestimated that way is...

This paper originates in an email sent by the second author wondering whether the first author knewabout Bronzin’s booklet on option pricing, dating back almost a century and containing formulas whichappear rather similar to those developed by Black-Scholes. The scepticism of the first author...

Real options present a wide topic in investment litterature nowadays. However, despite bigadvances in the single asset investment pricing, the theory is miser of informations aboutproblems involving more than one asset. We show in this paper that using dynamic programming,one can find an...