The ground-breaking Black-Scholes-Merton model has brought about a generation of derivative pricing models that have been successfully applied in the financial industry. It has been a long standing puzzle that the structural models of credit risk, as an application of the same modeling paradigm,...

By reinterpreting the calibration of structural models, a reassessment of the importance of the input variables is undertaken. The analysis shows that volatility is the key parameter to any calibration exercise, by several orders of magnitude. To maximize the sensitivity to volatility, a simple...

We show that time-varying volatility of volatility is a significant risk factor which affects the cross-section and the time-series of index and VIX option returns, beyond volatility risk itself. Volatility and volatility-of-volatility measures, identified modelfree from the option price data as...

It is well-known that Gaussian hedging strategies are robust in the sense that they always lead to a cost process of bounded variation and that a superhedge is possible if upper bounds on the volatility of the relevant processes are available, cf. El Karoui, Jeanblanc-Picque and Shreve (1998)...

The paper generalizes and refines the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing of Dalang, Morton and Willinger in the following two respects: (a) the result is extended to a model with portfolio constraints; (b) versions of the no-arbitrage criterion based on the bang-bang principle in control...

In this paper, the effects of so-called model misspecification and the effects of dropping the assumption that continuous rebalancing is possible are examined. Strategies which are robust if applied continuously fail to be robust if applied in discrete time. Therefore, the hedging bias which...

Tests for the existence and the sign of the volatility risk premium are often based on expected option hedging errors. When the hedge is performed under the ideal conditions of continuous trading and correct model specification, the sign of the premium is the same as the sign of the mean hedging...

Let S=(S_t), t=0,1,...,T (T being finite), be an adapted R^d-valued process. Each component process of S might be interpreted as the price process of a certain security. A trading strategy H=(H_t), t= 1,...,T, is a predictable R^d-valued process. A strategy H is called extreme if it represents a...

The spread risk premium component of credit default swap (CDS) spreads represents a compensation demanded by protection sellers for future changes in CDS spreads caused by unpredictable fluctuations in the reference entity"s risk-neutral default intensity. This paper defines and estimates a...

Outperformance-Zertifikate auf Aktienindizes in Fremdwährungsräumen Währungsgesicherte (Quanto-)Zertifikate auf internationale Indizes bieten Investoren teilweise eine deutlich höhere Performance als der jeweils zugrundeliegende Index erzielt. Diese vermeintliche Attraktivität von...