This article examines how the number of stochastic drivers and their associated volatility structures affect pricing accuracy and hedging performance in the swaption market. In spite of the fact that low dimensional one and two-factor models do not reflect historical correlations that exist among forward rates, we show that they are capable of accurately pricing swaptions as well as higher orde...

Energy companies with commitments to meet customers’ daily electricity demands face the problem of hedging load and price risk. We propose a joint model for load and price dynamics, which is motivated by the goal of facilitating optimal hedging decisions, while also intuitively capturing the key features of the electricity market. Driven by three stochastic factors including the load process, o...

The calendar spread options (CSOs) on agricultural commodities, most notably corn, soybeans and wheat, allow market participants to hedge the roll-over risk of futures contracts. Despite the interest from agricultural businesses, there is lack of both theoretical and empirical research on pricing and hedging performances of CSOs. We propose to price and hedge CSOs under geometric Brownian motio...

During the recent European sovereign debt crisis, returns on EMU government bond portfolios experienced substantial volatility clustering, leptokurtosis and skewed returns, as well as correlation spikes. Asset managers invested in European government bonds had to derive new hedging strategies to deal with the changing return properties and the higher level of uncertainty. In this market environ...

We compare single factor Markov-functional and multi factor market models for hedging performance of Bermudan swaptions. We show that hedging performance of both models is comparable, thereby supporting the claim that Bermudan swaptions can be adequately risk-managed with single factor models. Moreover, we show that the impact of smile can be much larger than the impact of correlation. We use t...

OF THE DISSERTATION In this thesis, we propose the Markov tree option pricing model and subject it to large-scale empirical tests against market options and equity data to quantify its pricing and hedging performances. We begin by proposing a tree model that explicitly accounts for the dependence observed in the log-returns of underlying asset prices. The dynamics of the Markov tree model is ex...

The purpose of this article is to introduce, analyze and compare two performance participation methods based on a portfolio consisting of two risky assets: Option-Based Performance Participation (OBPP) and Constant Proportion Performance Participation (CPPP). By generalizing the provided guarantee to a participation in the performance of a second risky underlying, the new strategies allow to co...

this study examined the effect of explicit instruction of hedging on english forspecific academic purposes (esap) reading comprehension performance ofenglish language learning (ell) university students. a reading comprehensiontest was developed and validated as the pretest and the posttest. the test, includingitems for assessing the comprehension of the students in their area of specialization,...