An artificial boundary method for the Hull–White model of American interest rate derivatives

Abstract

The Hull–White (HW) model is a widely used one-factor interest rate model because of its analytical tractability on liquidly traded derivatives, super-calibration ability to the initial term structure and elegant tree-building procedure. As an explicit finite difference scheme, lattice method is subject to some stability criteria, which may deteriorate the computational efficiency for early exercisable derivatives. This paper proposes an artificial boundary method based on the partial differential equations (PDEs) to price interest rate derivatives with early exercise (American) feature under the HW model. We construct conversion factors to extract the market information from the zero-coupon curve and then reduce the infinite computational domain into a finite one by using an artificial boundary on which an exact boundary condition is derived. We then develop an implicit θ-scheme with unconditional stability to solve the PDE in the reduced bounded domain. With a finite computational domain, the optimal exercise strategy can be determined efficiently. Our numerical examples show that the proposed scheme is accurate, robust to the truncation size, and more efficient than the popular lattice method for accurate derivative prices. In addition, the singularity-separating technique is incorporated into the artificial boundary method to enhance accuracy and flexibility of the numerical scheme.