We consider evaluation methods for payoffs with an inherent financial risk as encountered for instance for portfolios held by pension funds and insurance companies. Pricing such payoffs in a way consistent to market prices typically involves combining actuarial techniques with methods from...

We deal with several efficient discretization methods for the simulation of the Heston stochastic volatility model. The resulting schemes can be used to calculate all kind of options and corresponding sensitivities, in particular the exotic options that cannot be valued with closed-form...

In this paper we extend the stochastic volatility model of Schouml;bel and Zhu (1999) by including stochastic interest rates. Furthermore we allow all driving model factors to be instantaneously correlated with each other, i.e. we allow for a correlation between the instantaneous interest rates,...

Life insurance products have profit sharing features in combination with guarantees. These so-called embedded options are often dependent on or approximated by forward swap rates. In practice, these kinds of options are mostly valued by Monte Carlo simulations. However, for risk management...

The first three factors resulting from a principal components analysis of term structure data are in the literature typically interpreted as driving the level, slope and curvature of the term structure. Using slight generalisations of theorems from total positivity, we present sufficient...

We compare single factor Markov-functional and multi factor market models for hedging performance of Bermudan swaptions. We show that hedging performance of both models is comparable, thereby supporting the claim that Bermudan swaptions can be adequately risk-managed with single factor models....

This paper shows that the forward rates process discretized by a single time step together with a separability assumption on the volatility function allows for representation by a low-dimensional Markov process. This in turn leads to efficient pricing by for example finite differences. We then...

In this paper we show that contrary to the claim made in Longstaff, Santa-Clara, and Schwartz (2000a) and Longstaff, Santa-Clara, and Schwartz (2000b) discrete string models are not more parsimonious than market models. In fact, they are found to be observationally equivalent. We derived that...