Solar Renewable Energy Certificate (SREC) markets are a market-based system designed to incentivize solar energy generation. A regulatory body imposes a lower bound on the amount of energy each regulated firm must generate via solar means, providing them with a certificate for each MWh generated. Regulated firms seek to navigate the market to minimize the cost imposed on them, by modulating their SREC generation and trading activities. As such, the SREC market can be viewed through the lens of a large stochastic game with heterogeneous agents, where agents interact through the market price of the certificates. We study this stochastic game by solving the mean-field game (MFG) limit with sub-populations of heterogeneous agents. Our market participants optimize costs accounting for trading frictions, cost of generation, non-linear non-compliance penalty, and generation uncertainty. Moreover, we endogenize SREC price through market clearing. Using techniques from variational analysis, we characterize firms' optimal controls as the solution of McKean-Vlasov (MV) FBSDEs and determine the equilibrium SREC price. We establish the existence and uniqueness of a solution to this MV-FBSDE, and further prove that the MFG strategies have the $\epsilon$-Nash property for the finite player game. Finally, we develop a numerical scheme for solving the MV-FBSDEs and conclude by demonstrating how firms behave in equilibrium using simulated examples.

We propose an option approach for pricing bond illiquidity that is reminiscent of the celebrated work of Longstaff (1995) on the non-marketability of some non-dividend-paying shares in IPOs. This approach describes a quite common situation in the fixed income market: it is rather usual to find issuers that, besides liquid benchmark bonds, issue some other bonds that either are placed to a small number of investors in private placements or have a limited issue size.

We model interest rate and credit risks via a convenient reduced-form approach. We deduce a simple closed formula for illiquid corporate coupon bond prices when liquid bonds with similar characteristics (e.g. maturity) are present in the market for the same issuer. The key model parameter is the time-to-liquidate a position, i.e. the time that an experienced bond trader takes to liquidate a given position on a corporate coupon bond. We show that illiquid bonds present an additional liquidity spread that depends on the time-to-liquidate aside from bond volatility.

We provide a detailed application for two issuers in the European market.

We propose a fully data driven approach to calibrate local stochastic volatility (LSV) models, circumventing in particular the ad hoc interpolation of the volatility surface. To achieve this, we parametrize the leverage function by a family of feed forward neural networks and learn their parameters directly from the available market option prices. This should be seen in the context of neural SDEs and (causal) generative adversarial networks: we generate volatility surfaces by specific neural SDEs, whose quality is assessed by quantifying, in an adversarial manner, distances to market prices. The minimization of the calibration functional relies strongly on a variance reduction technique based on hedging and deep hedging, which is interesting in its own right: it allows to calculate model prices and model implied volatilities in an accurate way using only small sets of sample paths. For numerical illustration we implement a SABR-type LSV model and conduct a thorough statistical performance analyis on many samples of implied volatility smiles, showing the accuracy and stability of the method.

In this paper, we present a novel computational framework for portfolio-wide risk management problems where the presence of a potentially large number of risk factors makes traditional numerical techniques ineffective. The new method utilises a coupled system of BSDEs for the valuation adjustments (xVA) and solves these by a recursive application of a neural network based BSDE solver. This not only makes the computation of xVA for high-dimensional problems feasible, but also produces hedge ratios and dynamic risk measures for xVA, and allows simulations of the collateral account.

This paper investigates calculations of robust XVA, in particular, credit valuation adjustment (CVA) and funding valuation adjustment (FVA) for over-the-counter derivatives under distributional uncertainty using Wasserstein distance as the ambiguity measure. Wrong way counterparty credit risk and funding risk can be characterized (and indeed quantified) via the robust XVA formulations. The simpler dual formulations are derived using recent infinite dimensional Lagrangian duality results. Next, some computational experiments are conducted to measure the additional XVA charges due to distributional uncertainty under a variety of portfolio and market configurations. Finally some suggestions for future work are discussed.

Incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into systematic investments has drawn numerous attention recently. In this paper, we focus on the ESG events in financial news flow and exploring the predictive power of ESG related financial news on stock volatility. In particular, we develop a pipeline of ESG news extraction, news representations, and Bayesian inference of deep learning models. Experimental evaluation on real data and different markets demonstrates the superior predicting performance as well as the relation of high volatility prediction to stocks with potential high risk and low return. It also shows the prospect of the proposed pipeline as a flexible predicting framework for various textual data and target variables.

We analyze dependence, tail behavior and multimodality of the conditional distribution of a loss random vector given that the aggregate loss equals an exogenously provided capital. This conditional distribution is a building block for calculating risk allocations such as the Euler capital allocation of Value-at-Risk. A level set of this conditional distribution can be interpreted as a set of severe and plausible stress scenarios the given capital is supposed to cover. We show that various distributional properties of this conditional distribution are inherited from those of the underlying joint loss distribution. Among these properties, we find that multimodality of the conditional distribution is an important feature related to the number of risky scenarios likely to occur in a stressed situation. Moreover, Euler allocation becomes less sound under multimodality than under unimodality. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel risk allocation called the maximum likelihood allocation (MLA), defined as the mode of the conditional distribution given the total capital. The process of estimating MLA turns out to be beneficial for detecting multimodality, evaluating the soundness of risk allocations, and constructing more flexible risk allocations based on multiple risky scenarios. Properties of the conditional distribution and MLA are demonstrated in numerical experiments. In particular, we observe that negative dependence among losses typically leads to multimodality, and thus to multiple risky scenarios and less sound risk allocations.

Utilizing a generative regime switching framework, we perform Monte-Carlo simulations of asset returns for Value at Risk threshold estimation. Using equity markets and long term bonds as test assets in the global, US, Euro area and UK setting over an up to 1,250 weeks sample horizon ending in August 2018, we investigate neural networks along three design steps relating (i) to the initialization of the neural network, (ii) its incentive function according to which it has been trained and (iii) the amount of data we feed. First, we compare neural networks with random seeding with networks that are initialized via estimations from the best-established model (i.e. the Hidden Markov). We find latter to outperform in terms of the frequency of VaR breaches (i.e. the realized return falling short of the estimated VaR threshold). Second, we balance the incentive structure of the loss function of our networks by adding a second objective to the training instructions so that the neural networks optimize for accuracy while also aiming to stay in empirically realistic regime distributions (i.e. bull vs. bear market frequencies). In particular this design feature enables the balanced incentive recurrent neural network (RNN) to outperform the single incentive RNN as well as any other neural network or established approach by statistically and economically significant levels. Third, we half our training data set of 2,000 days. We find our networks when fed with substantially less data (i.e. 1,000 days) to perform significantly worse which highlights a crucial weakness of neural networks in their dependence on very large data sets ...

This study examines whether the efficiency of cryptocurrency markets (Bitcoin and Ethereum) evolve over time based on Lo's (2004) adaptive market hypothesis (AMH). In particular, we measure the degree of market efficiency using a generalized least squares-based time-varying model that does not depend on sample size, unlike previous studies that used conventional methods. The empirical results show that (1) the degree of market efficiency varies with time in the markets, (2) Bitcoin's market efficiency level is higher than that of Ethereum over most periods, and (3) a market with high market liquidity has been evolving. We conclude that the results support the AMH for the most established cryptocurrency market.

Based on administrative data of unemployed in Belgium, we estimate the labour market effects of three training programmes at various aggregation levels using Modified Causal Forests, a causal machine learning estimator. While all programmes have positive effects after the lock-in period, we find substantial heterogeneity across programmes and unemployed. Simulations show that 'black-box' rules that reassign unemployed to programmes that maximise estimated individual gains can considerably improve effectiveness: up to 20 percent more (less) time spent in (un)employment within a 30 months window. A shallow policy tree delivers a simple rule that realizes about 70 percent of this gain.

We present a natural extension of the SABR model to price both backward and forward-looking RFR caplets in a post-Libor world. Forward-looking RFR caplets can be priced using the market standard approximations of Hagan et al. (2002). We provide closed-form effective SABR parameters for pricing backward-looking RFR caplets. These results are useful for smile interpolation and for analyzing backward and forward-looking smiles in normalized units.

The quanto option is a cross-currency derivative in which the pay-off is given in foreign currency and then converted to domestic currency, through a constant exchange rate, used for the conversion and determined at contract inception. Hence, the dependence relation between the option underlying asset price and the exchange rate plays an important role in quanto option pricing.

In this work, we suggest to use empirical copulas to price quanto options. Numerical illustrations show that the flexibility provided by this approach, concerning the dependence relation of the two underlying stochastic processes, results in non-negligible pricing differences when contrasted to other models.

The magnitude of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has an enormous impact on the social life and the economic activities in almost every country in the world. Besides the biological and epidemiological factors, a multitude of social and economic criteria also govern the extent of the coronavirus disease spread in the population. Consequently, there is an active debate regarding the critical socio-economic determinants that contribute to the resulting pandemic. In this paper, we contribute towards the resolution of the debate by leveraging Bayesian model averaging techniques and country level data to investigate the potential of 29 determinants, describing a diverse set of socio-economic characteristics, in explaining the coronavirus pandemic outcome. We show that the true mathematical model of the coronavirus outcome is constituted only of few determinants, but the extent to which each determinant is able to provide an adequate explanation varies between countries due to their heterogeneous socioeconomic structures. To understand the relationship between the socio-economic determinants in the specification of the true model we develop the coronavirus determinants Jointness space. In this space, the potential determinants are linked with each other by their ability to jointly explain the coronavirus outcome. As such the Jointness space can be efficiently implemented for developing socio-economic policies aimed at prevention of future epidemic crises.

The decentralized international market of currency trading is a prototypical complex system having a highly heterogeneous composition. To understand the hierarchical structure relating the price movement of different currencies in the market, we have focused on quantifying the degree of similarity between the distributions of exchange rate fluctuations. For this purpose we use a metric constructed using the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the normalized logarithmic return distributions of the different currencies. This provides a novel method for revealing associations between currencies in terms of the statistical nature of their rate fluctuations, which is distinct from the conventional correlation-based methods. The resulting clusters are consistent with the nature of the underlying economies but also show striking divergences during periods of major international crises.