← Search

Generalized Transform Analysis of Affine Processes and Applications in Finance

Hui Chen1; Scott Joslin2

1 MIT Sloan School of Management and NBER · 2 USC Marshall School of Business

Review of Financial Studies 2012 open access

Nonlinearity is an important consideration in many problems of finance and economics, such as pricing securities and solving equilibrium models. This article provides analytical treatment of a general class of nonlinear transforms for processes with tractable conditional characteristic functions. We extend existing results on characteristic function-based transforms to a substantially wider class of nonlinear functions while maintaining low dimensionality by avoiding the need to compute the density function. We illustrate the applications of the generalized transform in pricing defaultable bonds with stochastic recovery. We also use the method to analytically solve a class of general equilibrium models with multiple goods and apply this model to study the effects of time-varying labor income risk on the equity premium.

DOI
10.1093/rfs/hhs065
Volume
25 (7)
Pages
2225-2256
Language
en
Export
BibTeX
Sources
openalex crossref