Calibrating option pricing models to market prices often leads to optimisation problems to which standard methods (like such based on gradients) cannot be applied. We investigate two models: Heston’s stochastic volatility model, and Bates’s model which also includes jumps. We discuss how to...

Given a set of time series, it is of interest to discover subsets that share similar properties. For instance, this may be useful for identifying and estimating a single model that may fit conveniently several time series, instead of performing the usual identification and estimation steps for...

The recent financial crisis has underlined that banks no longer simply accumulate deposits and lend a fraction to their clients. Instead they use interbank markets and structured finance to increase their loan book. This has implications for the understanding of interest rate pass through since...

Nonlinear nonstationary models for time series are considered, where the series is generated from an autoregressive equation whose coe±cients change both according to time and the delayed values of the series itself, switching between several regimes. The transition from one regime to the next...

Innovations, be they radical new products or technology improvements are widely recognized as a key factor of economic growth. To identify the factors triggering innovative activities is a main concern for economic theory and empirical analysis. As the number of hypotheses is large, the process...

The Nelson–Siegel–Svensson model is widely-used for modelling the yield curve, yet many authors have reported ‘numerical difficulties’ when calibrating the model. We argue that the problem is twofold: firstly, the optimisation problem is not convex and has multiple local optima. Hence...

This paper discusses the application of an index tracking technique to mutual fund replication problems. By using a tracking error (TE) minimization method and two tactical rebalancing strategies (i.e. the calendar based strategy and the tolerance triggered strategy), a multi-period fund...

In recent years, copulas have become very popular in financial research and actuarial science as they are more flexible in modelling the co-movements and relationships of risk factors as compared to the conventional linear correlation coefficient by Pearson. However, a precise estimation of the...