We present a derivative pricing and estimation methodology for a class of stochastic volatility models that exploits the observed 'bursty' or persistent nature of stock price volatility. Empirical analysis of high-frequency S&P 500 index data confirms that volatility reverts slowly to its mean...

There has been an on-going debate about choices of the most suitable model amongst a variety of model specifications and parameterizations. The first dissertation essay investigates whether asymmetric leptokurtic return distributions such as Hansen's (1994) skewed tdistribution combined with...

In electricity markets, futures contracts typically function as a swap since they deliver the underlying over a period of time. In this paper, we introduce a market price for the delivery periods of electricity swaps, thereby opening an arbitrage-free pricing framework for derivatives based on...

We consider several market models, where time is subordinated to a stochastic process. These models are based on various time changes in the Lévy processes driving asset returns, or on fractional extensions of the diffusion equation; they were introduced to capture complex phenomena such as...

We focus on two particular aspects of model risk: the inability of a chosen model to fit observed market prices at a given point in time (calibration error) and the model risk due to the recalibration of model parameters (in contradiction to the model assumptions). In this context, we use...

While the stochastic volatility (SV) generalization has been shown to improvethe explanatory power compared to the Black-Scholes model, the empiricalimplications of the SV models on option pricing have not been adequately tested.The purpose of this paper is to first estimate a multivariate SV...

At the time of writing this article, Fourier inversion is the computational method of choice for a fast and accurate calculation of plain vanilla option prices in models with an analytically available characteristic function. Shifting the contour of integration along the complex plane allows for...

The characteristic functions of many affine jump-diffusion models, such as Heston’s stochastic volatility model and all of its extensions, involve multivalued functions such as the complex logarithm. If we restrict the logarithm to its principal branch, as is done in most software packages,...