Switching Levy Models in Continuous Time: Finite Distributions and Option Pricing

Abstract

This paper introduces a general regime switching Levy process, and constructs the characteristic function in closed form. Correlations between the underlying Markov chain and the asset returns are also allowed, by imposing asset price jumps whenever a regime change takes place. Based on the characteristic function the conditional densities and vanilla option prices can be rapidly computed using FFT. It is shown that the regime switching model has the potential to capture a wide variety of implied volatility skews. The paper also discusses the pricing of exotic contracts, like barrier, Bermudan and American options, by implementation of a quadrature method. A detailed numerical experiment illustrates the application of the regime switching framework.

Keywords: volatility smile, volatility skew, derivative pricing, exotic derivatives, calibration