Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications

The paper presents an analytical proof demonstrating that the Sandwiched Volterra Volatility (SVV) model is able to reproduce the power-law behavior of the at-the-money implied volatility skew, provided the correct choice of the Volterra kernel. To obtain this result, the second-order Malliavin differentiability of the volatility process is assessed and the conditions that lead to explosive behavior in the Malliavin derivative are investigated. As a supplementary result, a general Malliavin product rule is proved.

The existence of density function of the running maximum of a stochastic differential equation (SDE) driven by a Brownian motion and a nontruncated pure-jump process is verified. This is proved by the existence of density function of the running maximum of the Wiener–Poisson functionals resulting from Bismut’s approach to the Malliavin calculus for jump processes.

The chaos expansion of a random variable with uniform distribution is given. This decomposition is applied to analyze the behavior of each chaos component of the random variable $\log \zeta $ on the so-called critical line, where ζ is the Riemann zeta function. This analysis gives a better understanding of a famous theorem by Selberg.

Explicit solutions for a class of linear backward stochastic differential equations (BSDE) driven by Gaussian Volterra processes are given. These processes include the multifractional Brownian motion and the multifractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. By an Itô formula, proven in the context of Malliavin calculus, the BSDE is associated to a linear second order partial differential equation with terminal condition whose solution is given by a Feynman-Kac type formula.

In this paper we present a numerical scheme for stochastic differential equations based upon the Wiener chaos expansion. The approximation of a square integrable stochastic differential equation is obtained by cutting off the infinite chaos expansion in chaos order and in number of basis elements. We derive an explicit upper bound for the ${L^{2}}$ approximation error associated with our method. The proofs are based upon an application of Malliavin calculus.