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 paper shows that the Esscher transform is also an efficient technique for valuing derivative securities if the logarithms of the prices of the primitive securities are governed by certain stochastic processes with stationary and independent increments. Two applications are presented, the first for valuing a European call option and the second for pricing derivative securities of multiple risky assets.