We analyse contracts which pay out a guaranteed minimum rate of return and a fraction of a positive excess rate, which is specified on the basis of a benchmark portfolio. These contracts are closely related to unit--linked life--insurance/savings plan products and can be considered as...

Turbo-Certificates are one of the most popular structured equity products for private investors in Germany. They can be regarded as special forms of barrier options. The relation between the barrier level and the strike price is especially important for the design of these products. By using a...

In this paper, we consider the net loss of a life insurance company issuing identical equity-linked pure endowment contracts in the case of periodic premiums. Under this construction, financial risks as well as the mortality risk are included. Based on Møller (1998), we particularly investigate...

The topic of insolvency risk in connection with life insurance companies has recently attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, the question is investigated of how the value of the equity and of the liability of a life insurance company are affected by the default risk and the choice...

This paper proposes two-step static hedging strategies for European basket options by using only plain-vanilla options on a subset of underlying assets. The basic idea is stimulated from a static super-hedging strategy dependent on the whole basket. However, it would be too complicated to handle...

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...

This paper deals with the superhedging of derivatives on incomplete markets, i.e. with portfolio strategies which generate payoffs at least as high as that of a given contingent claim. The simplest solution to this problem is in many cases a static superhedge, i.e. a buy-and-hold strategy...

In Kusuda [45], we developed equilibrium analysis in security market economy with jump-Wiener information where no finite number of securities can complete markets. Assuming approximately complete markets (Björk et al. [11] [12]) in which a continuum of bonds are traded and any contingent claim...

We analyze the relation between European natural gas storage facilities and price patterns at major trading points, considering the theory of storage to derive a testable hypothesis imposed by the non-arbitrage condition. To model the efficiency of the natural gas market, we apply two indirect...

The real option theory provides a useful tool to evaluate an R&D investment under uncertainty because, unlike the NPV (Net Present Value), it considers the managerial flexibility that may be expand the investment opportunity value. However, most R&D investment projects are open to competing...