SpringerBriefs in Quantitative Finance – serie

The main purpose of the book is to show how a viscosity approach can be used to tackle control problems in insurance. The problems covered are the maximization of survival probability as well as the maximization of dividends in the classical collective risk model. The authors consider the possibility of controlling the risk process by reinsurance as well as by investments. They show that optimal value functions are characterized as either the unique or the smallest viscosity solution of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation; they also study the structure of the optimal strategies and show how to find them.The viscosity approach was widely used in control problems related to mathematical finance but until quite recently it was not used to solve control problems related to actuarial mathematical science. This book is designed to familiarize the reader on how to use this approach. The intended audience is graduate students as well as researchers in this area.

Focusing on recent advances in option pricing under the SABR model, this book shows how to price options under this model in an arbitrage-free, theoretically consistent manner. It extends SABR to a negative rates environment, and shows how to generalize it to a similar model with additional degrees of freedom, allowing simultaneous model calibration to swaptions and CMSs.Since the SABR model is used on practically every trading floor to construct interest rate options volatility cubes in an arbitrage-free manner, a careful treatment of it is extremely important. The book will be of interest to experienced industry practitioners, as well as to students and professors in academia.Aimed mainly at financial industry practitioners (for example quants and former physicists) this book will also be interesting to mathematicians who seek intuition in the mathematical finance.

This open access book gives a concise introduction to the practical implementation of monetary policy by modern central banks. It describes the conventional instruments used in advanced economies and the unconventional instruments that have been widely adopted since the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Illuminating the role of central banks in ensuring financial stability and as last resort lenders, it also offers an overview of the international monetary framework. A flow-of-funds framework is used throughout to capture this essential dimension in a consistent and unifying manner, providing a unique and accessible resource on central banking and monetary policy, and its integration with financial stability. Addressed to professionals as well as bachelors and masters students of economics, this book is suitable for a course on economic policy. Useful prerequisites include at least a general idea of the economic institutions of an economy, and knowledge of macroeconomics and monetary economics, but readers need not be familiar with any specific macroeconomic models.

This book describes the diverse applications of Gaussian Process (GP) models in mathematical finance. Spurred by the transformative influence of machine learning frameworks, the text aims to integrate GP modeling into the fabric of quantitative finance. The first half of the book provides an entry point for graduate students, established researchers and quant practitioners to get acquainted with GP methodology. A systematic and rigorous introduction to both GP fundamentals and most relevant advanced techniques is given, such as kernel choice, shape-constrained GPs, and GP gradients. The second half surveys the broad spectrum of GP applications that demonstrate their versatility and relevance in quantitative finance, including parametric option pricing, GP surrogates for optimal stopping, and GPs for yield and forward curve modeling. The book includes online supplementary materials in the form of half a dozen computational Python and R notebooks that provide the reader direct illustrations of the covered material and are available via a public GitHub repository.

Offering a concise but complete survey of the common features of the microstructure of electricity markets, this book describes the state of the art in the different proposed electricity price models for pricing derivatives and in the numerical methods used to price and hedge the most prominent derivatives in electricity markets, namely power plants and swings. The mathematical content of the book has intentionally been made light in order to concentrate on the main subject matter, avoiding fastidious computations. Wherever possible, the models are illustrated by diagrams. The book should allow prospective researchers in the field of electricity derivatives to focus on the actual difficulties associated with the subject. It should also offer a brief but exhaustive overview of the latest techniques used by financial engineers in energy utilities and energy trading desks.

Filling a gap in the literature caused by the recent financial crisis, this book provides a treatment of the techniques needed to model and evaluate interest rate derivatives according to the new paradigm for fixed income markets. Concerning this new development, there presently exist only research articles and two books, one of them an edited volume, both being written by researchers working mainly in practice.  The aim of this book is to concentrate primarily on the methodological side, thereby providing an overview of the state-of-the-art and also clarifying the link between the new models and the classical literature. The book is intended to serve as a guide for graduate students and researchers as well as practitioners interested in the paradigm change for fixed income markets. A basic knowledge of fixed income markets and related stochastic methodology is assumed as a prerequisite.

This book provides an analysis, under both discrete-time and continuous-time frameworks, on the price dynamics of leveraged exchange-traded funds (LETFs), with emphasis on the roles of leverage ratio, realized volatility, investment horizon, and tracking errors. This study provides new insights on the risks associated with LETFs. It also leads to the discussion of new risk management concepts, such as admissible leverage ratios and admissible risk horizon, as well as the mathematical and empirical analyses of several trading strategies, including static portfolios, pairs trading, and stop-loss strategies involving ETFs and LETFs. The final part of the book addresses the pricing of options written on LETFs. Since different LETFs are designed to track the same reference index, these funds and their associated options share very similar sources of randomness. The authors provide a no-arbitrage pricing approach that consistently value options on LETFs with different leverage ratios withstochastic volatility and jumps in the reference index. Their results are useful for market making of these options, and for identifying price discrepancies across the LETF options markets. As the market of leveraged exchange-traded products become a sizeable connected part of the financial market, it is crucial to better understand its feedback effect and broader market impact. This is important not only for individual and institutional investors, but also for regulators.

This volume presents a unified mathematical framework for the transmission channels for damaging shocks that can lead to instability in financial systems. As the title suggests, financial contagion is analogous to the spread of disease, and damaging financial crises may be better understood by bringing to bear ideas from studying other complex systems in our world. After considering how people have viewed financial crises and systemic risk in the past, it delves into the mechanics of the interactions between banking counterparties. It finds a common mathematical structure for types of crises that proceed through cascade mappings that approach a cascade equilibrium. Later chapters follow this theme, starting from the underlying random skeleton graph, developing into the theory of bootstrap percolation, ultimately leading to techniques that can determine the large scale nature of contagious financial cascades.

This volume presents classical results of the theory of enlargement of filtration. The focus is on the behavior of martingales with respect to the enlarged filtration and related objects. The study is conducted in various contexts including immersion, progressive enlargement with a random time and initial enlargement with a random variable. The aim of this book is to collect the main mathematical results (with proofs) previously spread among numerous papers, great part of which is only available in French. Many examples and applications to finance, in particular to credit risk modelling and the study of asymmetric information, are provided to illustrate the theory. A detailed summary of further connections and applications is given in bibliographic notes which enables to deepen study of the topic.  This book fills a gap in the literature and serves as a guide for graduate students and researchers interested in the role of information in financial mathematics and in econometric science. A basic knowledge of the general theory of stochastic processes is assumed as a prerequisite.

This volume is a user-friendly presentation of the main theoretical properties of the Fourier-Malliavin volatility estimation, allowing the readers to experience the potential of the approach and its application in various financial settings.  Readers are given examples and instruments to implement this methodology in various financial settings and applications of real-life data.  A detailed bibliographic reference is included to permit an in-depth study.

This book summarizes recent advances in applying saddlepoint approximation methods to financial engineering. It addresses pricing exotic financial derivatives and calculating risk contributions to Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall in credit portfolios under various default correlation models. These standard problems involve the computation of tail probabilities and tail expectations of the corresponding underlying state variables. The text offers in a single source most of the saddlepoint approximation results in financial engineering, with different sets of ready-to-use approximation formulas. Much of this material may otherwise only be found in original research publications. The exposition and style are made rigorous by providing formal proofs of most of the results.Starting with a presentation of the derivation of a variety of saddlepoint approximation formulas in different contexts, this book will help new researchers to learn the fine technicalities ofthe topic. It will also be valuable to quantitative analysts in financial institutions who strive for effective valuation of prices of exotic financial derivatives and risk positions of portfolios of risky instruments.