Description: This paper examines the pricing of catastrophe risk bonds. Catastrophe risk cannot be hedged by traditional securities. Therefore the pricing of catastrophe risk bonds requires an incomplete markets setting and this creates special difficulties in the pricing methodology. The paper briefly discusses the theory of equilibrium pricing and its relationship to the standard arbitrage-free valuation framework. Equilibrium pricing theory is used to develop a pricing method based on a model of the term structure of interest rates and a probability structure for the catastrophe risk. This pricing methodology can be used to assess the default spread on catastrophe risk bonds relative to traditional defaultable securities.

Description: This is the abstract of the paper 'A Stochastic Definition of Future Shares'. The traditional definition of actuarial future values and stochastic definition of Ramsay are discussed. A modification of Ramsay's definition is proposed and an application to life insurance reserves is presented.

Description: This paper proposes to put the environment into financial markets. It explains how to do it, and why the financial approach is practically the only one able to stop and invert environmental degradation. The author concentrates on deforestation which is the largest environmental problem in the third world, and explains how to start the project and what kind of optimization problems should be solved for applications of the project.

Description: One of the most important problems in Finance is the valuation of financial securities written on underlying assets whose prices are subject to uncertainty. This paper presents a technique to estimate the unknown stochastic volatilities by solving the inverse problem associated with the parabolic partial differential equation governing risk neutral derivative security prices. This technique can be applied in a very general multi-factor setting and numerical examples are provided.

Description: This is the abstract of the paper Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Numerical Finance. This paper introduces and illustrates a new version of the Monte Carl method that has attractive properties for the numerical valuation of derivatives. The traditional Monte Carlo method has proven to be a powerful and flexible tool for many types of derivatives calculations.

Description: A European call option pricing model similar to the Black-Scholes equation [1] is derived. Like the Black-Scholes equation, the model is based upon an assumption of a lognormal distribution of the price of a risky, non-dividend-paying security at a given point in the future. However, unlike Black-Scholes, the market's risk preference is recognized through a parameter that permits refinement of the model to agree either with experience or with future advances in the underlying theory.

Description: This paper presents a new methodology for obtaining fast algorithms and closed form solutions for pricing callable bonds in continuous time models. Results are directly applicable to regulatory scenario testing, immunization and market value accounting.