Optimal Quota-Share and Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and Investment with Heston’s Stochastic Volatility Model

An optimal quota-share and excess-of-loss reinsurance and investment problem is studied for an insurer who is allowed to invest in a risk-free asset and a risky asset.Especially the price process of the risky asset is governed by Heston's stochastic volatility(SV)model.With the objective of maximizing the expected index utility of the terminal wealth of the insurance company,by using the classical tools of stochastic optimal control,the explicit expressions for optimal strategies and optimal value functions are derived.An interesting conclusion is found that it is better to buy one reinsurance than two under the assumption of this paper.Moreover,some numerical simulations and sensitivity analysis are provided.

Dynamic Hedging Based on Markov Regime-Switching Dynamic Correlation Multivariate Stochastic Volatility Model

It is important to consider the changing states in hedging.The Markov regime-switching dynamic correlation multivariate stochastic volatility( MRS-DC-MSV) model was proposed to solve this issue. DC-MSV model and MRS-DC-MSV model were used to calculate the time-varying hedging ratios and compare the hedging performance. The Markov chain Monte Carlo( MCMC) method was used to estimate the parameters. The results showed that,there were obviously two economic states in Chinese financial market. Two models all did well in hedging,but the performance of MRS-DCMSV model was better. It could reduce risk by nearly 90%. Thus,in the hedging period,changing states is a factor that cannot be neglected.

Simulation Methods of Stochastic Volatility Interest Rate Term Structure

A term structure model bearing features of stochastic volatility and stochastic mean drift with jump （SVJ-SD model for short） is built in the paper to describe the stochastic behavior of interest rates.Based on sample data of an interest rate of national bond repurchase,maximum likelihood （ML）,linear Kalman filter and efficient method of moments （EMM） are used to estimate the model.While ML works well for simple models,it may lead to considerable deviation in parameter estimation when dynamic risks of interest rates are considered in them.Linear Kalman filter is a tractable and reasonably accurate technique for estimation cases where ML was not feasible.Moreover,when compared with the first two approaches,using EMM can obtain better parameter estimates for complex models with non-affine structures.

Higher-order dynamic effects of uncertainty risk under thick-tailed stochastic volatility

Sudden and uncertain events often cause cross-contagion of risk among various sectors of the macroeconomy.This paper introduces the stochastic volatility shock that follows a thick-tailed Student’s t-distribution into a high-order approximate dynamic stochastic general equilibrium(DSGE)model with Epstein–Zin preference to better analyze the dynamic effect of uncertainty risk on macroeconomics.Then,the high-dimensional DSGE model(DSGE-SV-t)is developed to examine the impact of uncertainty risk on the transmission mechanism among macroeconomic sectors.The empirical research found that uncertainty risk generates heterogeneous impacts on macroeconomic dynamics under different inflation levels and economic states.Among them,a technological shock has the strongest impact on employment and consumption channels.The crowding-out effect of a fiscal policy stimulus on consumption and private investments is relatively weakened when considering uncertainty risk but is more pronounced during periods of high inflation.Uncertainty risk can partly explain the decline in investments and the increase in interest rates and employment rates,given the impact of an agent’s risk preferences.Compared with external economic conditions,the inflation factor has a stronger impact on the macro transmission mechanism caused by uncertainty risk.

A note on calculating expected shortfall for discrete time stochastic volatility models

In this paper we consider the problem of estimating expected shortfall(ES)for discrete time stochastic volatility(SV)models.Specifically,we develop Monte Carlo methods to evaluate ES for a variety of commonly used SV models.This includes both models where the innovations are independent of the volatility and where there is dependence.This dependence aims to capture the well-known leverage effect.The performance of our Monte Carlo methods is analyzed through simulations and empirical analyses of four major US indices.

Properties of Time-Varying Causality Tests in the Presence of Multivariate Stochastic Volatility

This paper compares the statistical properties of time-varying causality tests when errors of variables have multivariate stochastic volatility (SV). The time-varying causal-ity tests in this paper are based on a logistic smooth transition autoregressive model. The compared time-varying causality tests include asymptotic tests, heteroskedasticity-robust tests, and tests using wild bootstrap. Our simulation results show that asymptotic tests and heteroskedasticity-robust counterparts have size distortions under multivariate SV, whereas tests using wild bootstrap have better size properties regardless of type of error. In particular, the time-varying causality test with first-order Taylor approximation using wild bootstrap has better statistical properties.

Stochastic Volatility Modeling based on Doubly Truncated Cauchy Distribution and Bayesian Estimation for Chinese Stock Market

In order to measure the uncertainty of financial asset returns in the stock market, this paper presents a new model, called SV-dt C model, a stochastic volatility(SV) model assuming that the stock return has a doubly truncated Cauchy distribution, which takes into account the high peak and fat tail of the empirical distribution simultaneously. Under the Bayesian framework, a prior and posterior analysis for the parameters is made and Markov Chain Monte Carlo(MCMC) is used for computing the posterior estimates of the model parameters and forecasting in the empirical application of Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index(SSECI) with respect to the proposed SV-dt C model and two classic SV-N(SV model with Normal distribution)and SV-T(SV model with Student-t distribution) models. The empirical analysis shows that the proposed SV-dt C model has better performance by model checking, including independence test(Projection correlation test), Kolmogorov-Smirnov test(K-S test) and Q-Q plot. Additionally, deviance information criterion(DIC) also shows that the proposed model has a significant improvement in model fit over the others.

Stochastic Volatility Model and Technical Analysis of Stock Price

In the stock market, some popular technical analysis indicators （e.g. Bollinger Bands, RSI, ROC, ...） are widely used by traders. They use the daily （hourly, weekly, ...） stock prices as samples of certain statistics and use the observed relative frequency to show the validity of those well-known indicators. However, those samples are not independent, so the classical sample survey theory does not apply. In earlier research, we discussed the law of large numbers related to those observations when one assumes Black-Scholes＇ stock price model. In this paper, we extend the above results to the more popular stochastic volatility model.

Empirical Evidence of the Leverage Effect in a Stochastic Volatility Model： A Realized Volatility Approach

Increasing attention has been focused on the analysis of the realized volatil- ity, which can be treated as a proxy for the true volatility. In this paper, we study the potential use of the realized volatility as a proxy in a stochastic volatility model estimation. We estimate the leveraged stochastic volatility model using the realized volatility computed from five popular methods across six sampling-frequency transaction data （from 1-min to 60- min） based on the trust region method. Availability of the realized volatility allows us to estimate the model parameters via the MLE and thus avoids computational challenge in the high dimensional integration. Six stock indices are considered in the empirical investigation. We discover some consistent findings and interesting patterns from the empirical results. In general, the significant leverage effect is consistently detected at each sampling frequency and the volatility persistence becomes weaker at the lower sampling frequency.

Option Pricing under the Double Exponential Jump-Diffusion Model with Stochastic Volatility and Interest Rate

This paper proposes an efficient option pricing model that incorporates stochastic interest rate(SIR),stochastic volatility(SV),and double exponential jump into the jump-diffusion settings.The model comprehensively considers the leptokurtosis and heteroscedasticity of the underlying asset’s returns,rare events,and an SIR.Using the model,we deduce the pricing characteristic function and pricing formula of a European option.Then,we develop the Markov chain Monte Carlo method with latent variable to solve the problem of parameter estimation under the double exponential jump-diffusion model with SIR and SV.For verification purposes,we conduct time efficiency analysis,goodness of fit analysis,and jump/drift term analysis of the proposed model.In addition,we compare the pricing accuracy of the proposed model with those of the Black-Scholes and the Kou(2002)models.The empirical results show that the proposed option pricing model has high time efficiency,and the goodness of fit and pricing accuracy are significantly higher than those of the other two models.

A Delayed Stochastic Volatility Correction to the Constant Elasticity of Variance Model

The Black-Scholes model does not account non-Markovian property and volatility smile or skew although asset price might depend on the past movement of the asset price and real market data can find a non-flat structure of the implied volatility surface. So, in this paper, we formulate an underlying asset model by adding a delayed structure to the constant elasticity of variance （CEV） model that is one of renowned alternative models resolving the geometric issue. However, it is still one factor volatility model which usually does not capture full dynamics of the volatility showing discrepancy between its predicted price and market price for certain range of options. Based on this observation we combine a stochastic volatility factor with the delayed CEV structure and develop a delayed hybrid model of stochastic and local volatilities. Using both a martingale approach and a singular perturbation method, we demonstrate the delayed CEV correction effects on the European vanilla option price under this hybrid volatility model as a direct extension of our previous work [12].

A novel stochastic modeling framework for coal production and logistics through options pricing analysis

We propose a novel stochastic modeling framework for coal production and logistics using option pricing theory.The problem of valuing the inherent real optionality a coal producer has when mining and processing thermal coal is modelled as pricing spread options of three assets under the stochastic volatility model.We derive a three-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform(“FFT”)lower bound approximation to value the inherent real optionality and for robustness check,we compare the semi-analytical pricing accuracy with the Monte Carlo simulation.Model parameters are estimated from the historical monthly data,and stochastic volatility parameters are obtained by matching the Kurtosis of the low-ash diff data to the Kurtosis of the stochastic volatility process which is assumed to follow Cox–Ingersoll–Ross(“CIR”)model.

Orthogonal polynomial expansions for the valuation ofoptions under the stochastic volatility models with stochastic correlation

This work provides a new method for pricing options under the generalized stochastic volatility models with Jacobi stochastic correlation.Our method is based on the observation that the generalized models belong to the class of polynomial diffusions and therefore the option prices can be efficiently computed via orthogonal polynomial expansions.We take the Heston and Schöbel-Zhu models with stochastic correlation as two specific examples and are able to derive the analytical formulas for the option prices.We also illustrate the accuracy of the proposed method through a number of numerical experiments.

Market Risk Evaluation on Single Futures Contract:SV-CVaR Model and Its Application on Cu00 Data

A new stochastic volatility（SV）method to estimate the conditional value at risk（CVaR）is put forward.Firstly,it makes use of SV model to forecast the volatility of return.Secondly,the Markov chain Monte Carlo（MCMC）simulation and Gibbs sampling have been used to estimate the parameters in the SV model.Thirdly,in this model,CVaR calculation is immediate.In this way,the SV-CVaR model overcomes the drawbacks of the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity value at risk（GARCH-VaR）model.Empirical study suggests that this model is better than GARCH-VaR model in this field.

Early exercise premium method for pricing American options under the J-model

Background:This study develops a new model called J-am for pricing American options and for determining the related early exercise boundary(EEB).This model is based on a closed-form solution J-formula for pricing European options,defined in the study by Jerbi(Quantitative Finance,15:2041-2052,2015).The J-am pricing formula is a solution of the Black&Scholes(BS)PDE with an additional function called f as a second member and with limit conditions adapted to the American option context.The aforesaid function f represents the cash flows resulting from an early exercise of the option.Methods:This study develops the theoretical formulas of the early exercise premium value related to three American option pricing models called J-am,BS-am,and Heston-am models.These three models are based on the J-formula by Jerbi(Quantitative Finance,15:2041-2052,2015),BS model,and Heston(Rev Financ Stud,6:327-343,1993)model,respectively.This study performs a general algorithm leading to the EEB and to the American option price for the three models.Results:After implementing the algorithms,we compare the three aforesaid models in terms of pricing and the EEB curve.In particular,we examine the equivalence between J-am and Heston-am as an extension of the equivalence studied by Jerbi(Quantitative Finance,15:2041-2052,2015).This equivalence is interesting since it can reduce a bi-dimensional model to an equivalent uni-dimensional model.Conclusions:We deduce that our model J-am exactly fits the Heston-am one for certain parameters values to be optimized and that all the theoretical results conform with the empirical studies.The required CPU time to compute the solution is significantly less in the case of the J-am model compared with to the Heston-am model.

The valuation of barrier options under a threshold rough Heston model

In this paper,we propose a novel model for pricing double barrier options,where the asset price is modeled as a threshold geometric Brownian motion time changed by an integrated activity rate process,which is driven by the convolution of a fractional kernel with the CIR process.The new model both captures the leverage effect and produces rough paths for the volatility process.The model also nests the threshold diffusion,Heston and rough Heston models.We can derive analytical formulas for the double barrier option prices based on the eigenfunction expansion method.We also implement the model and numerically investigate the sensitivities of option prices with respect to the parameters of the model.

Parallelization and Acceleration of Dynamic Option Pricing Models on GPU-CPU Heterogeneous Systems

In this paper,stochastic global optimization algorithms,specifically,genetic algorithm and simulated annealing are used for the problem of calibrating the dynamic option pricing model under stochastic volatility to market prices by adopting a hybrid programming approach.The performance of this dynamic option pricing model under the obtained optimal parameters is also discussed.To enhance the model throughput and reduce latency,a heterogeneous hybrid programming approach on GPU was adopted which emphasized a data-parallel implementation of the dynamic option pricing model on a GPU-based system.Kernel offloading to the GPU of the compute-intensive segments of the pricing algorithms was done in OpenCL.The GPU approach was found to significantly reduce latency by an optimum of 541 times faster than a parallel implementation approach on the CPU,reducing the computation time from 46.24 minutes to 5.12 seconds.

Efficient Simulations of Option Pricing and Greeks Under Three-Factor Model by Conditional Monte Carlo Method

This paper proposes a hybrid Monte Carlo simulation method for pricing European options under the stochastic volatility model and three-factor model.First,the European options are expressed as a conditional expectation formula,which can be used not only for reducing variance of simulations,but also for calculating the value of Greeks easily,due to the elimination of the weak singularity for the payoff of the option.Then,in order to reduce variance further,the authors also construct a new explicit regression based control variate under Heston model and three-factor model respectively.Numerical results of experiments show that the proposed method can greatly reduce the variance of simulation for pricing European option,and is easy to complement for the calculation of Greeks.

Inflation Uncertainty and Monetary Policy in China

This paper uses a stochastic volatility model structural break tests with unknown point, and a counterfactual simulation method to discuss the significant decline in inflation uncertainty in China over 1978-2009. We attempt to quantify the contributions of better monetary policy and smaller structural shocks （including demand, supply and policy impacts） on the reduced inflation uncertainty. Empirical results in the present paper suggest that improved monetary policy accounts for only a small fraction of the reduction in inflation uncertainty from the pre-1997 period to the post-1997 period in China. The bulk of the significant moderation in inflation uncertainty arises from smaller shocks. This finding indicates that the quiescence of inflation in China over the past decade could well be followed by a return to a more turbulent inflation era. Therefore, the use of preemptive monetary policy to anchor inflationary expectations and keep moderate inflation uncertainty is warranted.

Homotopy Analysis Method for Portfolio Optimization Problem Under the 3/2 Model

This paper considers the Merton portfolio optimization problem for an investor that aims at maximizing the expected power utility of the terminal wealth and intermediate consumption.Applying the homotopy analysis method,an analytical solution for value function as well as optimal strategy under the 3/2 model is derived,respectively.Compared with the existing explicit solutions for Merton problem under the 3/2 model,the formulas provide certain parameters with less requirement since the homotopy analysis method does not depend on the existence of small parameters in the equation.Finally,numerical examples are examined with the approach,and the proposed solution provides more accurate approximation as the number of terms in infinite series increases.