The paper analyzes insurance contracts where the benefits of the insured depend on the performance of an investment strategy and which guarantee a certain interest rate on the contributions made by the insured. The insured has to decide simultaneously on the investment strategy and the guarantee...

This paper explores how economic uncertainty evolves over time and how it is priced in the market. We solve for the variance premium, the prices of equity index options, and the prices of volatility related derivatives in a long-run risks model. We find that both short-run and long-run...

This paper analyzes tractable robust hedging strategies in diffusion-type models including stochastic volatility models. A robust hedging strategy avoids any losses as long as volatility stays within a given interval. It does not depend on the exact specification of the volatility process and...

Since trading cannot take place continuously, the optimal portfolio calculated in a continuous-time model cannot be held, but the investor has to implement the continuous-time strategy in discrete time. This leads to the question how severe the resulting discretization error is. We analyze this...

Empirical evidence shows that the implied volatility smiles for index options are significantly steeper than those for individual options. We propose a model setup where we start from the joint dynamics of the stocks and where the index value is a weighted sum of individual stock prices. Then...

The paper analyzes insurance contracts where the benefits of the insured depend on the performance of an investment strategy and which guarantee a certain interest rate on the contributions made by the insured. The insured has to decide simultaneously on the investment strategy and the guarantee...

Stocks are exposed to the risk of sudden downward jumps. Additionally, a crash in one stock (or index) can increase the risk of crashes in other stocks (or indices). Our paper explicitly takes this contagion risk into account and studies its impact on the portfolio decision of a CRRA investor...

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...