When the pricing kernel is U-shaped, then expected returns of claims with payout on the upside are negative for strikes beyond a threshold, determined by the slope of the U-shaped kernel in its increasing region, and have negative partial derivative with respect to strike in the increasing...

In this paper, we combine modern portfolio theory and option pricing theory so that a trader who takes a position in a European option contract and the underlying assets can construct an optimal portfolio such that at the moment of the contract's maturity the contract is perfectly hedged. We...

This technical note provides a detailed description of a simple but effective modeling solution to mark and risk manage plain-vanilla options on dividend futures. We focus on equity indices, as dividend products for single stocks are less liquid and observable and we derive a simple pricing...

We study the problem of pricing contingent claims in the presence of uncertainty about the timing and the size of a jump in the price of the underlying. We characterize the price of the claim as the minimal solution of a constrained BSDE and derive a pricing PDE in the special case of a...

Pricing a contingent claim on a non-tradable asset (e.g. a management warrant package in an LBO) cannot be done with standard hedging based option pricing theory. Common alternatives are utility indifference pricing, suggested by various authors, or risk premium pricing (using the option pricing...

We develop a novel framework for computing the total valuation adjustment (XVA) of a European claim accounting for funding costs, counterparty credit risk, and collateralization. Based on no-arbitrage arguments, we derive the nonlinear backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs)...

Numerous studies find S-shaped pricing kernels, which is conflicting with standard theory. In contrast to that, based on a novel GARCH model with structural breaks, I show that the pricing kernel is consistently U-shaped. The results are robust to variations in the methodology and hold for...

This paper tests the pricing accuracy and the hedging performance of the stochastic volatility with random jumps model in markets extended to contain swap contracts whose payoffs depend on the realized higher moments of the state variable. Using a two-step iterative approach, latent model...

Risk premia are related to price probability ratios or for continuous time pure jump processes the ratios of jump arrival rates under the pricing and physical measures. The variance gamma model is employed to synthesize densities with risk premia seen as the ratio of the three parameters. The...

Contingent claims analysis applied to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, and Thailand shows no particular vulnerability to sovereign debt distress during recent years. However, the highly volatile “distance to distress” measure suggests that any of these countries...