A method to price American-style option contracts in a limited information framework is introduced. The pricing methodology is based on sequential Monte Carlo techniques, as presented in Doucet, de Freitas, and Gordon's text "Sequential Monte Carlo Methods in Practice", and the least-squares...

We introduce a new method to price American-style options on underlying investments governed by stochastic volatility (SV) models. The method does not require the volatility process to be observed. Instead, it exploits the fact that the optimal decision functions in the corresponding dynamic...

This paper proposes a novel positive nonparametric estimator of the conditional variance function without reliance on logarithmic or other transformations. The estimator is based on an empirical likelihood modification of conventional local level nonparametric regression applied to squared mean...

This paper discusses nonparametric kernel regression with the regressor being a d-dimensional ß-null recurrent process in presence of conditional heteroscedasticity. We show that the mean function estimator is consistent with convergence rate p n(T)hd, where n(T) is the number of regenerations...

In the last decade, stress tests have become indispensable in bank risk management which has led to significantly increased requirements for stress tests for banks and regulators. Although the complexity of stress testing frameworks has been enhanced considerably over the course of the last few...

This paper examines international equity market co-movements using time-varying copulae. We examine distributions from the class of Symmetric Generalized Hyperbolic (SGH) distributions for modelling univariate marginals of equity index returns. We show based on the goodness-of-fit testing that...

We introduce a new importance sampling method for pricing basket default swaps based on exchangeable Archimedean copulas and nested Gumbel copulas. We establish more realistic dependence structure than the existing copula models for credit risks in the underlying portfolio, and propose an...

Adverse weather related risk is a main source of crop production loss and a big concern for agricultural insurers and reinsurers. In response, weather risk hedging may be valuable, however, due to basis risk it has been largely unsuccessful to date. This research proposes the Levy subordinated...

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive Monte Carlo simulation study on the performance of minimum-distance (MD) and maximum-likelihood (ML) estimators for bivariate parametric copulae. In particular, I consider Cramer-von-Mises-, Kolmogorov-Smirnov- and L1-variants of the...

Our aim is to present an alternative methodology to the standard formula imposed to the insurance regulation (the European directive knows as Solvency II) for the calculus of the capital requirements. We want to demonstrate how this formula is now obsolete and how is possible to obtain lower...