arXiv subjects

Julian Hölzermann

Publications and source records attributed to Julian Hölzermann.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Optimal Investment with Stochastic Interest Rates and Ambiguity

This paper studies dynamic asset allocation with interest rate risk and several sources of ambiguity. The market consists of a risk-free asset, a zero-coupon bond (both determined by a Vasicek model), and a stock. There is ambiguity about the risk premia, the volatilities, and the correlation. The investor's preferences display both risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. The optimal investment problem admits a closed-form solution. The solution shows that the ambiguity only affects the speculative motives of the investor, representing a hedge against the ambiguity, but not the hedging of interest rate risk. An implementation of the optimal investment strategy shows that ambiguity aversion helps to tame the highly leveraged portfolios neglecting ambiguity and leads to strategies that are more in line with popular investment advice.

q-fin.PM↗

arXiv2021

Pricing Interest Rate Derivatives under Volatility Uncertainty

In this paper, we study the pricing of contracts in fixed income markets under volatility uncertainty in the sense of Knightian uncertainty or model uncertainty. The starting point is an arbitrage-free bond market under volatility uncertainty. The uncertainty about the volatility is modeled by a G-Brownian motion, which drives the forward rate dynamics. The absence of arbitrage is ensured by a drift condition. Such a setting leads to a sublinear pricing measure for additional contracts, which yields either a single price or a range of prices. Similar to the forward measure approach, we define the forward sublinear expectation to simplify the pricing of cashflows. Under the forward sublinear expectation, we obtain a robust version of the expectations hypothesis, and we show how to price options on forward prices. In addition, we develop pricing methods for contracts consisting of a stream of cashflows, since the nonlinearity of the pricing measure implies that we cannot price a stream of cashflows by pricing each cashflow separately. With these tools, we derive robust pricing formulas for all major interest rate derivatives. The pricing formulas provide a link to the pricing formulas of traditional models without volatility uncertainty and show that volatility uncertainty naturally leads to unspanned stochastic volatility.

q-fin.PR↗

arXiv2021

Term Structure Modeling under Volatility Uncertainty

In this paper, we study term structure movements in the spirit of Heath, Jarrow, and Morton [Econometrica 60(1), 77-105] under volatility uncertainty. We model the instantaneous forward rate as a diffusion process driven by a G-Brownian motion. The G-Brownian motion represents the uncertainty about the volatility. Within this framework, we derive a sufficient condition for the absence of arbitrage, known as the drift condition. In contrast to the traditional model, the drift condition consists of several equations and several market prices, termed market price of risk and market prices of uncertainty, respectively. The drift condition is still consistent with the classical one if there is no volatility uncertainty. Similar to the traditional model, the risk-neutral dynamics of the forward rate are completely determined by its diffusion term. The drift condition allows to construct arbitrage-free term structure models that are completely robust with respect to the volatility. In particular, we obtain robust versions of classical term structure models.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2021

The Hull-White Model under Volatility Uncertainty

We study the Hull-White model for the term structure of interest rates in the presence of volatility uncertainty. The uncertainty about the volatility is represented by a set of beliefs, which naturally leads to a sublinear expectation and a G-Brownian motion. The main question in this setting is how to find an arbitrage-free term structure. This question is crucial, since we can show that the classical approach, martingale modeling, does not work in the presence of volatility uncertainty. Therefore, we need to adjust the model in order to find an arbitrage-free term structure. The resulting term structure is affine with respect to the short rate and the adjustment factor. Although the adjustment changes the structure of the model, it is still consistent with the traditional Hull-White model after fitting the yield curve. In addition, we extend the model and the results to a multifactor version, driven by multiple risk factors.

q-fin.PR↗