Category: Finance

Too-many-to-fail: a theoretical approach

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series showcasing Barcelona GSE master projects by students in the Class of 2014. The project is a required component of every master program.

Too-many-to-fail: a theoretical approach

Author:

Jaume Martí

Master Program:

Finance

Paper Abstract:

The recent financial crisis has generated enormous economic and human costs. New regulatory framework has been proposed in order to provide banks with better incentives.

My goal in this project is to theoretically explain several market failures that happened prior to the financial crisis and propose a model that captures these phenomena in the banking sector. To end up, I suggest different macroprudential measures that could be undertaken with the ultimate objective of providing a more stable financial system.

[slideshare id=39413387&doc=too-many-to-fail-140923034120-phpapp02]

Realized Volatility Estimation – Barcelona GSE Master Projects 2014

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series showcasing Barcelona GSE master projects by students in the Class of 2014. The project is a required component of every master program.

Realized Volatility Estimation

Authors:

Miquel Masoliver, Guillem Roig, Shikhar Singla

Master Program:

Finance

Paper Abstract:

The main purpose of this study is to try to find the optimal volatility estimator in a non-parametric framework. In particular, this study focuses on the estimation of the daily integrated variance-covariance matrix of stock returns using simulated and high-frequency data in the presence of market microstructure noise, jumps, and non-synchronous trading. This work is structured in three building blocks: (i) price processes are simulated in the presence of jumps and market microstructure noise. This allows us to obtain some insight about the estimators’ performance. (ii) The aforementioned realized volatility estimators are applied to high-frequency data of the S&P 100 stocks of October 27th 2010 using 5-second, 10-second, 30-second, 1-minute and 2-minute time intervals. (iii) We use the estimated covariance matrices to construct the global minimum variance portfolio for each sampling frequency. These global minimum variance portfolios are used to build 30 day ex-post portfolio’s returns and we use the variance of these returns to compare between the performance of the estimators.

Read the full paper or view slides below:

[slideshare id=38815437&doc=volatility-slides-140908041738-phpapp01]

Interest rates after the credit crunch crisis: single versus multiple curve approach

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series showcasing Barcelona GSE master projects by students in the Class of 2014. The project is a required component of every master program.

Interest rates after the credit crunch crisis: single versus multiple curve approach

Authors:

Oleksandr Dmytriiev, Yining Geng, and Cem Sinan Ozturk

Master Program:

Finance

Paper Abstract:

For interest rate derivative pricing, 2007 crisis was a turning point. Prior to the crisis, market interest rates showed consistencies that allowed the use of a single curve for both forwarding and discounting. After the crisis, the inconsistencies in the market interest rates led to development of a new method of the pricing interest rate derivatives, which is called Multi-Curve Framework. We studied the influence of the multi-curve approach on the interest rate derivative pricing. We calculated and compared the price of a simple swap in both multi-curve and single curve approaches. We suggested the generalization of the lattice approach, which is usually used to approximate the short interest rate models, for milti-curve framework. This is a novel result, which have not been developed in the scientific literature. As an example, we showed how to use the Black-Derman-Toy interest rate model on binomial lattice in multi-curve framework and calculated the price of the 2-8 period swaption in a single (LIBOR) curve and two-curve (OIS+LIBOR) approaches. This technique can be used for pricing any interest rate instrument.

Read the full paper or view slides below:

[slideshare id=37188585&doc=interest-rates-credit-slides-140721040122-phpapp02]