Older adults, women, and minorities are the least active segments of the US population. The purpose of this study was to identify barriers and motivations to exercise associated with older African American and European American women. Eighty-nine European American and 115 African American women (mean age 72 years) completed a pencil-and-paper questionnaire composed of general demographic inform...

Nonstandard finite difference schemes for the Black-Scholes partial differential equation preserving the positivity property are proposed. Computationally simple schemes are derived by using a nonlocal approximation in the reaction term of the Black-Scholes equation. Unlike the standard methods, the solutions of new proposed schemes are positive and free of the spurious oscillations.

Recent evidence suggests that the association between parents' use of non-supportive emotion socialization practices and their children's subsequent negative emotional outcomes varies based on ethnicity. The goal of this study is to test the proposition that African American women interpret parental non-supportive emotion socialization practices less negatively than European American women. In ...

We consider the numerical solution of discretised Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations with applications in finance. For the discrete linear complementarity problem arising in American option pricing, we study a policy iteration method. We show, analytically and numerically, that, in standard situations, the computational cost of this approach is comparable to that of European option pricing...

We see that the price of an european call option in a stochastic volatility framework can be decomposed in the sum of four terms, which identify the main features of the market that affect to option prices: the expected future volatility, the correlation between the volatility and the noise driving the stock prices, the market price of volatility risk and the difference of the expected future v...

The goal of this paper is to show that the jump-diffusion models are an essential and easy-to-learn tool for option pricing and risk management, and that they provide an adequate description of stock price fluctuations and market risks. We try to give an overview of the field without focusing on technical details. After introducing several widely used jump-diffusion models, we discuss Fourier t...

The examination of the theory and history of financial crisis in Europe and the United States is the subject matter of two important works by Kindle Berger (Kindle Herger, 1978, and Kindle Berger & Lafarge, 1982). In his first work, Kindle Berger (1978), has provided us with a remarkable account of European and American financial history from 1720 to 1975. The second hook (Kindle Berger & Lafar...

Financial modeling is one application that benefits substantially from Grid's multiprocessing capabilities. Together with the Centre for Financial Engineering, TCG@NUS’s project team worked on identifying suitable applications and enabling them on the TCG@NUS. The first application identified was Structured Product Pricing (SPP) a Monte Carlo-style simulation application which uses the historic...

We investigate the effect of martingale control as a smoother for MC/QMC methods. Numerical results of estimating low-biased solutions of the American put option price under the Black-Scholes model demonstrate the unreliability of using QMC methods. But it can be fixed by considering a martingale control variate estimator. In another example of estimating European option prices under stochastic...