Empirical Studies on Interest Rate Derivatives

Abstract

EMPIRICAL STUDIES ON INTEREST RATE DERIVATIVES by Xudong Sun Dr. Hongtao Yang, Examination Committee Chair Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA Interest rate models are the building blocks of nancial market and the interest rate derivatives market is the largest derivatives market in the world. In this dissertation, we shall focus on numerical pricing of interest rate derivatives, estimating model parameters by Kalman lter, and studying various models empirically. We shall propose a frontxing nite element method to price the American put option under the quadratic term structure framework and compare it with a trinomial tree method and common nite element method. Numerical test results show the superiority of our frontxing nite element method in the aspects of computing the option and free boundary simultaneously with high accuracy. We shall also employ the Kalman lter and its variant techniques to estimate parameters of the a ne term structure models as well as quadratic term structure models. Various comparisons of di erent Kalman lter performance and both the in-sample t and out-sample t for Monte Carlo simulations as well as real treasury yield data are presented. In addition, we shall propose a general one-factor interest rate model and apply a homotopy perturbation method to valuate bond prices. One of the attractive qualities of the approximated solution of homotopy perturbation method is its fast speed of achieving the same accuracy compared to the tree method.