1. Introduction
Conditional expectations are useful statistical values applied in many branches in science, especially in describing behaviors of observed data, and are often studied from a probabilistic viewpoint based on transition probability density functions (PDFs) of the data. Many applications in finance and economics require the knowledge of conditional expectations, for example, in the valuation of financial products, e.g., contingent claims such as coupon bonds, swaps, discount factor, etc., as can be seen in the works of Ben-Ameur et al. [
1] and Grasselli [
2] for more details.
To value financial products, the no-arbitrage principle is essential; if arbitrage exists, it is guaranteed that the investor can make profit from nothing, which provides an investment opportunity with infinite return. To satisfy the arbitrage-free property, symmetric information is required [
3]. The valuation of a contingent claim is usually investigated based on the conditional expectation (
1) under a filtered risk-neutral probability space
in the form
where
and
is an adapted stochastic process describing the underlying asset, and for some real value functions
and
with
.
In this work, we consider the conditional expectations (
1) in the form
where
and to be more specific, the process
is considered as a short rate described by the extended Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (ECIR) process [
4]. The case that
in (
2) was also studied in Duffie et al.’s work [
5] for the class of affine jump-diffusion processes with generalized payoff, including some case studies such as those of Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) and the Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (CIR) or squared processes. To be more general, the Wiener process
in the ECIR process can be generalized by using the mixed fractional Brownian motion, i.e., a linear combination of the Wiener process
and the fractional Brownian motion
with the Hurst parameter,
. The mixed fractional Brownian motion has some useful characteristic, e.g., it is arbitrage free and gains more attention for applications in finance. An example of an application based on the mixed fractional Brownian motion is described in [
6].
Note that the contingent claim prices in the forms (
1) and (
2) have many useful applications. In finance, a non-arbitrage price at time
t of financial derivatives is considered on a conditional expectation under a risk-neutral measure of their discounted payoff, more details of which can be found in [
7]. Therefore, the valuations of financial derivatives, such as the coupon bonds, variance swaps, interest rate swaps, and options, always involve calculating the forms of conditional expectations (
1) and (
2).
Since many processes describing financial assets have no transition PDFs in simple form, the conditional expectations, the valuation of many financial products involving (
1) and (
2) usually are not accessible in closed form; thus, alternative methods are required. In practice, when analytical formulas for the expectations are not known in concise form, a practical method such as the Monte Carlo simulation is required, which has disadvantages in term of computational time. This paper aims to propose a closed-form formula for the conditional expectation (
1) based on the solution of a partial differential equation (PDE) according to the Feynman–Kac representation, without requiring the knowledge of the transition PDF. In some applications, the related PDEs may have no closed form solution and numerical methods are required in order to obtain the results, for example, Ahmadian and Ballestra [
8] proposed the finite element method to solve ruin-related problems, and Liang and Zou [
9] studied the valuation of credit contingent interest rate swap with credit rating migration using the alternating direction implicit method.
The CIR process is a diffusion process satisfying the Pearson Equation [
10] and involving a wide variety of issues in many branches—more details on this can be found in [
11]. This process was initially introduced by Feller [
12] as a population growth stochastic model and becomes popular in finance when Cox et al. [
13] applied it to describe the evolution behavior of short-term interest rates. Even though the CIR process is very useful in terms of pricing financial derivatives, especially short-term interest rates, the process has a limitation on its constant parameters, which are not suitable for modeling time-varying observed data. A lot of strong empirical evidence has found that extreme movements in finance-based practices tend to be assumed in function of the time, more details on which can be found in [
4,
14,
15]. In 1990, Hull and White [
4] proposed a novel SDE such that the dynamics of the CIR process can be governed by time-depending parameters, which is called the ECIR process. The ECIR process is so attractive as a practical model to price the European bond option. In 2003, Egorov et al. [
16] presented the transition PDF of the ECIR process in a complicated form of the modified Bessel function of the first kind and proposed a method to receive a closed-form approximation of the transition PDF through the Hermite approximation. This is one of the most practically used empirical evidences to confirm that it is not easy to obtain the conditional expectation (
2) by using the transition PDF of the ECIR process.
For this work, we assume that
is governed by the ECIR process and
is a bounded continuous discount rate function; the value of the asset at initial time
t can be rewritten as
, as can also be seen in [
17]. With
and
where
, under the probability measure
P, Dufresne [
18] derived a closed-form formula for the conditional moments,
, for some sufficient conditions on
and the parameters in the CIR process
. In 2007, under a risk-neutral probability
Q based on the CIR process, Ben-Ameur et al. [
1] estimated an ex-coupon holding value at time
T,
, where
f denotes the value of the bond at time
T. Their result is applicable but not in closed-form solutions. Moreover, they needed to find the joint distribution of the random vector
where
. This is characterized by its Laplace transform which can be described by the conditional expectation (
2) when
and
. Recently, under the CIR process, Grasselli [
2] directly determined a mathematical expression of the conditional expectation (
2). However, their expression was expressed in terms of a product of the confluent hypergeometric function and the gamma functions. This may be hard to work with in some cases.
We move our focus onto the ECIR process. In 2016, under probability measures, an analytical formula was proposed by Rujivan [
19] which was extended from Dufresne’s approach [
18] to the ECIR process for the case
. In 2018, an explicit formula for the conditional expectations of a product of polynomial and exponential function, in the form
, was analytically derived by Sutthimat et al. [
20] for the case
. Their results cover the results in such formulas of the Rujivan’s present [
19] in the case of
. Indeed, both works on the ECIR process have a limitation. A major concern for their formulas in Theorems 1 and 2 of their works [
19,
20] is that the coefficients
may not be integrable to receive the exact integrations. Some numerical methods for integrations are required to manipulate those integral terms in this very reason. However, both results presented in [
19,
20] did not provide any methods to overcome this issue. Both results are not ready for practical applications. In our analysis, we also present a numerical method to deal with this challenge.
The useful applications of (
2) under the CIR and ECIR processes need to be mentioned. To price interest rate swaps (IRSs), a financial contingent claim, which is a financial derivative whose payoff depends on the uncertain future real value of other underlying assets, is assumed together to follow the CIR process. The IRS is one of the common types of contingent claim derivatives as a modified version of swaps. Normally, the cash flows of IRSs on the payment dates are the same as the forward rate agreements (FRAs) which are the contact that the forward rates can be fixed by an investor. In brief, an IRS is a form of series of FRAs. We give some interesting works under the assumption that the discount rate is continuously compounded, which have been well studied in the literature and can apply our result of (
2) to those works. In 2004, Mallier and Alobaidi [
21] supposed that the risk-neutral interest rates follow the CIR process. By utilizing the Green’s function approach, they provided analytical expressions of the swap values for two well-known types of IRSs, which are the arrears and vanilla swaps. Their analytical expressions, a sum of values of the FRAs, which was in a closed form for an arrears swap but very complicated because it depends on the gamma and the Kummer’s functions. However, for a vanilla swap, their result was not in closed form and much more complicated than the results of those arrears swaps. Unlike the results of Mallier and Alobaidi, Moreno and Platania [
22] provided a mathematical formula for the FRA values in 2015 for a special case of the ECIR process, namely the cyclical square-root model; more details on this can be found in their Proposition 8. Thus, an interest rate swap valuation was straightforwardly obtained as a consequence of this proposition. In fact, Proposition 8 in their work consists of the Mathieu cosine and sine functions [
23] and the parameter
given in this proposition may not be exactly integrable. Thamrongrat and Rujivan [
24] recently published an analytical formula for pricing IRSs in terms of bond prices based on the ECIR process which was performed under a discrete discount rate.
This paper successfully worked out an analytical formula of the conditional expectations (
2) for the ECIR process in terms of analytical expression. Furthermore, their consequences were investigated without requiring the transition PDF of the ECIR process. Additionally, for the CIR process, the formulas were reduced to concise forms which give a greater advantage than the other approaches in the literature. Furthermore, the ECIR process-facilitated valuation of financial derivatives is provided by using our proposed results. Under ECIR process, this paper further suggests a numerical algorithm of the conditional expectations (
2) in case the Riccati differential equation may not be exactly solved.
This paper is organized as follows. A brief overview of the CIR process as well as the ECIR process are provided in
Section 2. The key methodology is mentioned in
Section 3 to address the main relevant concept for our main result, which is an analytical formula of the conditional expectations (
2) of the ECIR process.
Section 4 gives a numerical method to work with the generalized Riccati differential equation and one major concerned limitation of our formula is discussed here.
Section 5 validates our formulas and discusses the analytical formulas’ advantages compared with the Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. In
Section 6, some financial applications are demonstrated based on our proposed formula. The aim of this study is recapitulated and concluded in
Section 7.
2. The Extended Cox–Ingersoll–Ross Process
In this paper, we assume that the interest rate
follows the ECIR process under a risk-neutral probability measure
Q, which is a diffusion model whose solution satisfies the following SDE [
4],
The well-known
is a Wiener process or Brownian motion whose increments are generated by the symmetry of mean zero Gaussian distribution. Sometimes, the parameters in (
3) are referred to as follows:
is the speed of adjustment to the long-term mean
, while
indicates to the state space of the diffusion. The two assumptions explored by Maghsoodi [
15] are required to demonstrate that there is a path-wise unique strong solution for the ECIR process
and to avoid zero a.e. with regard to the probability measure
P for a specified time
t during a time period
; more details on this can be found in Theorems 2.1 and 2.4 of [
15]. We thus require the following sufficient condition.
Assumption 1. Time parameters and in (3) are smooth and strictly positive. The time function is locally bounded and on . To achieve our aim, a common question arises: why not directly use the transition PDF of the CIR process? It is known that its transition PDF has an expression in a form of Gamma density function and Laguerre polynomials; more details on this can be found in [
25,
26]. The transition PDF can be written in an explicit form as
where
and
is the ordered
q Bessel function of the first kind,
Since the transition PDF is complicated, as shown above, solving the closed-form formulas for (
2) by applying the transition PDF is more complicated.
It becomes even more difficult in the ECIR process, for example, as in the ECIR
process observed by Egorov et al. in 2003 [
16]. Its dynamics are followed by a time-inhomogeneous diffusion process as
where
are positive,
is real and
d is positive. Its transition PDF was first proposed by Maghsoodi [
15],
with
,
,
,
and again
is the Bessel function of the first kind. To avoid using those of the transition PDFs for solving (
2), this paper applies Feynman–Kac representation which offers a method for solving a conditional expectation of an Itô random process by deterministic implementations, more details on which can be found in [
27,
28,
29,
30].
4. Numerical Procedures
The valuation of the contingent claim with polynomial payoff based on the ECIR process through Theorem 1, the Formula (
4), is an infinite sum of coefficients in (
5). These coefficients are defined as in the integral forms and depend on many parameters. Under certain circumstances, i.e., when parameters are complicated, the integral cannot be precisely evaluated, or when the Riccati differential Equation (
7) cannot be solved directly. Thus, numerical methods are required to approximate the coefficients. In this section, we numerically investigate the coefficients in (
5) by utilizing numerical schemes based on the symmetry concept to approximate the Formula (
4).
Let us first consider the Riccati differential Equation (
7). From Corollary 3, if the Riccati differential equation has constant coefficients, it has the exact solution, as shown in (
18). However, if it has variable coefficients, the analytical solution is not easily obtained. In this case, one needs to approximate the solution by a numerical method; for example, in this work, we use the fourth-order Runge–Kutta (RK4) method [
31]. Thus, we are concerned with the following initial value problem:
for
. We uniformly divide
into
m subintervals generated by
,
, where
is the step size. Then, we denote (
23) by
Let
; then
. By employing the RK4 method, we have four increments as follows:
thus, we obtain that
Now, we have the approximate solutions
of the Riccati differential equation at each nodal point
,
. We denote
. Afterwards, this vector solution
is used to estimate the coefficients in (
5). Since (
5) is in integral form, in this work, we construct matrix representation for integration based on the concept of trapezoidal rule. By considering an integral function from the initial point
to each point
,
, it is approximated by the trapezoidal rule. We obtain:
From these integrations, we can construct the integration matrix by
and denote this by
. This
is called the integration matrix, which is easily computed. We will then approximate the integral terms of
for
in (
5) using the integration matrix
, and we have
where
,
and
; the elements of
and
can be directly calculated by (
6). The notation ⊙ is the Hadamard product defined in [
32] as the product of element-wise at the same positions in matrices. In this work, we use the exponential function of a matrix to denote the matrix whose element is the exponential of the element in that component.
Finally, we obtain the numerical formula for the pricing of the
T-claim with the polynomial payoff (
4) by
where
and
are the last components of vector solutions
and
described above, respectively. Moreover, we can reduce the number of computational points
m, but still preserve the accuracy by using other numerical integration approaches such as Simpson’s rule, Newton–Cotes, quadrature formula, etc., as can be seen in [
33] for more details and references.
6. Contingent Claims Pricing
In the context of pricing an option, assume that the underlying asset is set up to follow the ECIR process (
3); we first define the following process
where
and
g are nonnegative functions. In particular, according to Karatzas and Shreve’s exercise 8.13 in [
35], the process
in (
25) gives the unique wealth process with the initial wealth
x; more details on this can be found in [
35]. This is also called the valuation process of a contingent claim
, where
is the terminal payoff at maturity and
is the payoff rate.
This section illustrates an application for valuing the contingent claim with a date of maturity T, which depends on the underlying asset following the ECIR or CIR process. The analytical formulas for a contingent claim are provided in the following theorems.
Proposition 1. Let follow the ECIR process (3) with and . Suppose that and for , thenfor , , and and are given in Corollary 1. Proof. Applying Fubini’s theorem and Corollary 1 yields
Setting
obtains (
26) as required. □
Remark 5. Suppose that and , where follows the ECIR process with and , , for some sequences of real numbers in which and are not zero. According to Proposition 1, we have Furthermore, for a CIR process, the above equation can readily be reduced to the following form Corollary 8. Suppose that follows the CIR process. According to Proposition 1 with (also called fixed rate), and , , we havefor , , and is given in Corollary 3. Proof. From (
20) in Corollary 4 with
, then
,
, and
for all
and
. Recalling Remark 5, we have
First, considering
for only
yields
and the remaining terms, for
,
□
The benefits of these theorems to some well-known pricing instruments are shown in the following examples.
Example 4. Zero-coupon bond.
The valuation of a zero coupon bond at time
t with expiration date
T,
is given by the expression
where
follows the ECIR process. Applying Corollary 1 by setting
, we obtain the formula for the price of the zero coupon bond
In the case that
follows the CIR process, Corollary 4 is used to produce the closed-form formula for valuing the zero coupon bond
where
and
Remark 6. If we set and for the CIR process, we obtain the identical formula for the zero-coupon bond which appears in many pieces of literature.
Example 5. Two bonds interest rate swap.
In this example, we apply the Corollary 1 for pricing the value of fixed rate for a floating swap, in which one company agrees to pay a fixed interest rate and receives in exchange a floating rate, see [
21]. We consider the interest swap as the difference between the two bonds. From the point of view of the fixed ratepayer, the value of the interest rate swap, denoted by
, is
where
is the value of floating rate bond, and
is the value of fixed rate bond; see [
36] for more details.
Suppose that the value of the swap is zero at the initial time
t and the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), then zero rates are used as discount rates, denoted by
, which follows the ECIR process. Then
for some integer
, where
t is the initial time,
is the time until the
payment is exchanged;
is the fixed payment made at time
t;
is the LIBOR zero rates corresponding to maturity
t; and
L is the notional principal in swap agreement. Thus, the value of the interest rate swap at time
T is
To calculate (
28), Corollary 1 can be applied by setting
.
An arrears swap, also known as a delayed reset swap, is one of the traded instruments in the over-the-counter market, in which two companies or financial institutes decide to exchange periodic payments with another. In this interest rate fixed for floating swap, the floating rate paid on a payment date is based on the interest rate observed at the end of the reset period, as can be seen in [
36] for more details.
Let
be a fixed rate,
be a floating rate at time
t, and
P be a notional principle. Suppose that an arrears swap has an expiration date
T with
N payment dates at
in an increment of
,
. The payoff of such a swap from a floating rate payer’s point of view at the
payment date,
, is the difference between interest in a notional principle considered by the fixed and floating interest rates, which can be expressed in the form
. By the fundamental theorem of asset pricing [
3], a no-arbitrage price at any time
t of the arrears swap,
, is the conditional expectation of the sum of each payoff discounted to the initial time
, which is
By applying Corollary 1 and setting
and
, the value of the arrears swap (
29) can be obtained as an analytical form. It should be noted that the fair value for paying the fixed rate is