Penalty Methods for Bilateral XVA Pricing in European and American Contingent Claims by a PDE Model

Abstract

Taking into account default risk in the valuation of financial derivatives has become increasingly important, especially after the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Under some assumptions, the valuation of financial derivatives, including a value adjustment to account for default risk (the so-called XVA), gives rise to a nonlinear PDE. We propose numerical methods for handling the nonlinearity in this PDE, the most efficient of which are discrete penalty iteration methods. We first formulate a penalty iteration method for the case of European contingent claims, and study its convergence. We then extend the method to the case of American contingent claims, resulting in a double-penalty iteration. We also propose boundary conditions and their discretization for the XVA PDE problem in the cases of call and put options, as well as the case of a forward contract. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.