Consider a model for optimal timing of emissions reduction, trading off the cost of the reduction against the time-additive aggregate of environmental damage, the disutility from the pollutant stock M(t) the infrastructure contributes to. Intuitively, the optimal timing for an infinitesimal...

In the recent years, di usion models for interest rates became very pop- ular. In this paper, we try to do a selection of a suitable di usion model for the Italian interest rates. Our data set is given by the yields on three-month BOT, from 1981 to 2001, for a total of 470 observations. We...

Currency mismatches in corporate balance sheets have been singled out as an important factor underlying the severity of recent financial crises. We propose several structural models for measuring default risk for firms with currency mismatches in their asset/liability structure. The proposed...

Many stochastic differential equations (SDEs) do not have readily available closed-form expressions for their transitional probability density functions (PDFs). As a result, a large number of competing estimation approaches have been proposed in order to obtain maximum-likelihood estimates of...

Maximum-likelihood estimates of the parameters of stochastic differential equations are consistent and asymptotically efficient, but unfortunately difficult to obtain if a closed form expression for the transitional probability density function of the process is not available. As a result, a...

We develop a general error analysis framework for the Monte Carlo simulation of densities for functionals in Wiener space. We also study variance reduction methods with the help of Malliavin derivatives. For this, we give some general heuristic principles which are applied to diffusion...

We introduce a variation of the proof for weak approximations that is suitable for studying the densities of stochastic processes which are evaluations of the flow generated by a stochastic differential equation on a random variable that maybe anticipating. Our main assumption is that the...

This paper studies the application of exact simulation methods for multi-dimensional multiplicative noise stochastic differential equations to filtering. Stochastic differential equations with multiplicative noise naturally occur as Zakai equation in hidden Markov chain filtering. The paper...

Simulation estimators, such as indirect inference or simulated maximum likelihood, are successfully employed for estimating models where the likelihood function does not have a simple analytical expression. They adjust for the bias (inconsistency) produced by the estimation of an auxiliary model...

We consider an investor who has available a bank account (risk free asset) and a stock (risky asset). It is assumed that the interest rate for the risk free asset is zero and the stock price is modeled by a diffusion process. The wealth can be transferred between the two assets under a...