Assuming constant interest rates Brennan and Schwartz (1976, 1979) obtained the rational insurance premium on an equity-linked insurance contract through the application of the theory of contingent claims pricing. Further considerations with deterministic interest rates have been discussed in...

Starting with observable annually compounded forward rates we derive a term structure model of interest rates. The model relies upon the assumption that a specific set of annually compounded forward rates is log-normally distributed. We derive solutions for interest rate caps and floors as well...

The extension of the Black-Scholes option pricing theory to the valuation of barrier options is reconsidered. Working in the binomial framework of CRR we show how various types of barrier options can be priced either by backward induction or by closed binomial formulas. We also consider...

Alternative ways of introducing uncertainty to the term structure of interest rates are considered. They correspond to the different expectation hypotheses...

We review the continuous-time literature on the so-called direct approach to bond option pricing. Going back to Ball and Torous (1983), this approach models bond price processes directly (i.e. without reference to interest rates or state variable processes) and applies methods that Black and...

This paper presents the one- and the multifactor versions of a term structure model in which the factor dynamics are given by Cox/Ingersoll/Ross (CIR) type "square root" diffusions with piecewise constant parameters. The model is fitted to initial term structures given by a finite number of data...

Ant Colony Optimization is a relatively new meta-heuristic that has proven its quality and versatility on various combinatorial optimization problems such as the traveling salesman problem, the vehicle routing problem and the job shop scheduling problem.(...)

A consequence of the Hahn-Banach theorem is the classical bipolar theorem which states that the bipolar of a subset of a locally convex vector pace equals its closed convex hull.(...)

The Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing states - roughly speaking - that the absence of arbitrage possibilities for a stochastic process S is equivalent to the existence of an equivalent martingale measure for S. It turns out that it is quite hard to give precise and sharp versions of this...

The market model of interest rates specifies simple forward or Libor rates as lognormaly distributed, their stochastic dynamics has a linear volatility function. This model is extended to quadratic volatility which is the product of a quadratic polynomial and a level-independent covariance...