Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of intergenerational and international sharing of longevity and growth risks. Current research on worldwide demographic changes highlights the importance of longevity risk on financial markets and the need to devise optimal hedging...

These lecture notes are about financial innovations. We ask why are there some innovation and how is an innovative idea realized. This forces us to consider practical and structural aspects (regulations, taxation, markets) as key drivers of innovations and also basic formal aspects in valuation....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of intergenerational and international sharing of longevity and growth risks. Current research on worldwide demographic changes highlights the importance of longevity risk on financial markets and the need to devise optimal hedging...

This paper studies the information content of the S&P 500 and VIX markets on the volatility of the S&P 500 returns. We estimate a flexible affine model based on a joint time series of underlying indexes and option prices on both markets. An extensive model specification analysis reveals that...

International evidence on the accrual anomaly is sparse and conflicting. Testing for accrual mispricing in 28 equity markets, we provide statistical evidence for anomalous returns in some countries. However, we question whether this result might have occurred by chance alone and that it might...

We introduce new quantile estimators with adaptive importance sampling. The adaptive estimators are based on weighted samples that are neither independent nor identically distributed. Using the law of iterated logarithm for martingales, we prove the convergence of the adaptive quantile...

With increasing appreciation of the fact that stock return variance is stochastic and variance risk is heavily priced, the industry has created a series of variance derivative products to span variance risk. The variance swap contract is the most actively traded of these products. It pays at...

The validation of probability calibration is an inherently difficult task. We develop a testing procedure for credit-scoring models. The models comprise two components to check whether the ex-ante probabilities support the ex-post frequencies. The first component tests the level of the...

This paper concerns the pricing of American options with stochastic stopping time constraints expressed in terms of the states of a Markov process. Following the ideas of Menaldi, Robin, and Sun (1996) we transform the constrained into an unconstrained optimal stopping problem. The...