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.

A new multi-factor short rate model is presented which is bounded from below by a real-valued function of time. The mean-reverting short rate process is modeled by a sum of pure-jump Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes such that the related bond prices possess affine representations. Also the dynamics of the associated instantaneous forward rate is provided and a condition is derived under which the model can be market-consistently calibrated. The analytical tractability of this model is illustrated by the derivation of an explicit plain vanilla option price formula. With view on practical applications, suitable probability distributions are proposed for the driving jump processes. The paper is concluded by presenting a post-crisis extension of the proposed short and forward rate model.