In a recent paper, Longstaff and Schwartz (2001) suggest a method to American option valuation based on simulation. The method is termed the Least Squares Monte Carlo (LSM) method, and although it has become widely used, not much is known about the properties of the estimator. This paper...

A stochastic volatility model where volatility was driven solely by a latent variable called news was estimated for three stock indices. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm was used for estimating Bayesian parameters and filtering volatilities. Volatility persistence being close to one was...

Financial time series have two features which, in many cases, prevent the use of conventional estimators of volatilities and correlations: leptokurtotic distributions and contamination of data with outliers. Other techniques are required to achieve stable and accurate results. In this paper, we...

Using more than two years of daily interest rate cap price data, this paper provides a systematic documentation of a volatility smile in cap prices. We find that Black (1976) implied volatilities exhibit an asymmetric smile (sometimes called a sneer) with a stronger skew for in-the-money caps...

We introduce a new calibration methodology that allows perfect fitting of the displaced diffusion LIBOR market model to caplets and co-terminal swaptions, whilst avoiding global optimizations. The approach works by regarding a forward rate as a difference of swap rates and then bootstrapping...

We apply the results of Malliavin-Thalmaier-Watanabe for strong and weak Taylor expansions of solutions of perturbed stochastic differential equations (SDEs). In particular, we determine weight expressions for the Taylor coefficients of the expansion. The results are applied to LIBOR market...