Changing interest rates constitute one of the major risk sources for
banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions. Modeling
the term-structure movements of interest rates is a challenging task.
This volume gives an introduction to the mathematics of term-structure
models in continuous time. It includes practical aspects for
fixed-income markets such as day-count conventions, duration of
coupon-paying bonds and yield curve construction; arbitrage theory;
short-rate models; the Heath-Jarrow-Morton methodology; consistent
term-structure parametrizations; affine diffusion processes and option
pricing with Fourier transform; LIBOR market models; and credit risk.
The focus is on a mathematically straightforward but rigorous
development of the theory. Students, researchers and practitioners will
find this volume very useful. Each chapter ends with a set of exercises,
that provides source for homework and exam questions. Readers are
expected to be familiar with elementary Itô calculus, basic probability
theory, and real and complex analysis.