Mathematical Finance Seminar

December 7, 2000 , 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM

Agnes Tourin, University of Toronto

Numerical schemes for variational inequalities arising in international asset pricing

A joint work with Hodder and Zariphopoulou on numerical schemes for Variational Inequalities arising in international asset pricing will be presented. We developed a continuous time model of international asset pricing in a two-country framework which considers political risk, that is the uncertainty about future government actions which may impact the value of firms or welfare of individuals. Recently, we have observed international asset prices and exchange rates yoyoing up and down in response to sequences of gouvernment actions. In order to capture this sort of phenomenon, we model political risk using a stochastic process with jumps. We formulate this model as a singular stochastic control problem and the solution of the optimization problem is characterized as the unique viscosity (weak) solution of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. We then derive a numerical scheme to compute the asset prices in both countries, the free boundaries characterizing the trading policies and a real exchange rate.