A canonical setting and separating times for continuous local martingales

The notion of a separating time for a pair of measures on a filtered space is helpful for studying problems of (local) absolute continuity and singularity of measures. In this paper, we describe a certain canonical setting for continuous local martingales (abbreviated below as CLMs) and find an explicit form of separating times for CLMs in this setting.     

Embedding and asymptotic expansions for martingales

The paper develops a way of embedding general martingales in continuous ones in such a way that the quadratic variation of the continuous martingale has conditional cumulants (given the original martingale) that are explicitly given in terms of optional and predictable variations of the original process. Bartlett identities for the conditional cumulants are also found. A main corollary to these results is the establishment of second (and in some cases higher) order asymptotic expansions for martingales.Research supported in part by National Science Foundation grant DMS 93-05601 and Army Research Office grant DAAH04-1-0105     

Determinantal martingales and noncolliding diffusion processes

Two aspects of noncolliding diffusion processes have been extensively studied. One of them is the fact that they are realized as harmonic Doob transforms of absorbing particle systems in the Weyl chambers. Another aspect is integrability in the sense that any spatio-temporal correlation function can be expressed by a determinant. The purpose of the present paper is to clarify the connection between these two aspects. We introduce a notion of determinantal martingale and prove that, if the system has determinantal-martingale representation, then it is determinantal. In order to demonstrate the direct connection between the two aspects, we study three processes.     

Exit probability estimates for martingales in geodesic balls,using curvature

Summary Kallenberg and Sztencel have recently discovered exponential upper bounds, independent of dimension, on the probability that a vector martingale will exit from a ball in Euclidean space by timet. This article extends their results to martingales on Riemannian manifolds, including Brownian motion, and shows how exit probabilities depend on curvature. Using comparison with rotationally symmetric manifolds, these estimates are easily computable, and are sharp up to a constant factor in certain cases.     

The joint law of the maximum and terminal value of a martingale

Summary In this paper, we characterise the possible joint laws of the maximum and terminal value of a uniformly-integrable martingale. We also characterise the joint laws of the maximum and terminal value of a convergent continuous local martingale vanishing at zero. A number of earlier results on the possible laws of the maximum can be deduced quite easily.     

Convergence of Riesz space martingales

We prove a martingale convergence for sub and super martingales on Riesz spaces. As a consequence we can form Krickeberg and Riesz like decompositions. The minimality of the Krickeberg decomposition yields a natural ordered lattice structure on the space of convergent martingales making this space into a Dedekind complete Riesz space. Finally we show that the Riesz space of convergent martingales is Riesz isomorphic to the order closure of the union of the ranges of the conditional expectations in the filtration. Consequently we can characterize the space of order convergent martingales both in Riesz spaces and in the setting of probability spaces.     

Exponential integrability of martingales

We obtain the exponential integrability of the maximal function, the quadratic variation and the conditional quadratic variation of bounded martingales and exponential integrable martingales.     

Sharp maximal inequality for nonnegative martingales

Let X be a nonnegative martingale, let H be a predictable process taking values in [−1,1] and let Y be an Itô integral of H with respect to X. We establish the bound and show that the constant 3 is the best possible.     

Skorokhod embeddings, minimality and non-centred target distributions

In this paper we consider the Skorokhod embedding problem for target distributions with non-zero mean. In the zero-mean case, uniform integrability provides a natural restriction on the class of embeddings, but this is no longer suitable when the target distribution is not centred. Instead we restrict our class of stopping times to those which are minimal, and we find conditions on the stopping times which are equivalent to minimality. We then apply these results, firstly to the problem of embedding non-centred target distributions in Brownian motion, and secondly to embedding general target laws in a diffusion. We construct an embedding (which reduces to the Azema-Yor embedding in the zero-target mean case) which maximises the law of sup_s≤TB_s among the class of minimal embeddings of a general target distribution μ in Brownian motion. We then construct a minimal embedding of μ in a diffusion X which maximises the law of sup_s≤Th(X_s) for a general function h.     

Two-parameter diffusion processes and martingales

We introduce a class of two-parameter processes which are diffusions on each coordinate and satisfy a particular Markov property related to the partial ordering in R²₊. These processes can be expressed as solutions of some stochastic integral equations driven by a two-parameter Wiener process and two families of ordinary Brownian motions. This result is based on a characterization of two-parameter martingales with orthogonal increments.     

Existence and uniqueness of semimartingale reflecting Brownian motions in an orthant

Summary This work is concerned with the existence and uniqueness of a class of semimartingale reflecting Brownian motions which live in the non-negative orthant of ^d . Loosely speaking, such a process has a semimartingale decomposition such that in the interior of the orthant the process behaves like a Brownian motion with a constant drift and covariance matrix, and at each of the (d-1)-dimensional faces that form the boundary of the orthant, the bounded variation part of the process increases in a given direction (constant for any particular face) so as to confine the process to the orthant. For historical reasons, this pushing at the boundary is called instantaneous reflection. In 1988, Reiman and Williams proved that a necessary condition for the existence of such a semimartingale reflecting Brownian motion (SRBM) is that the reflection matrix formed by the directions of reflection be completely-L. In this work we prove that condition is sufficient for the existence of an SRBM and that the SRBM is unique in law. It follows from the uniqueness that an SRBM defines a strong Markov process. Our results have potential application to the study of diffusions arising as approximations tomulti-class queueing networks.Research supported in part by NSF Grants DMS 8657483, 8722351 and 9023335, and a grant from AT&T Bell Labs. In addition, R.J. Williams was supported in part during the period of this research by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship     

Reflected Brownian motion in a cone: Semimartingale property

Summary In this paper, the object of study is reflected Brownian motion in a cone ind-dimensions (d3) with nonconstant oblique reflection on each radial line emanating from the vertex of the cone. The basic question considered here is When is this process a semimartingale?. Conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the process for which the vertex is an instantaneous state were given by Kwon, which is resolved in terms of a real parameter depending on the cone and the direction of reflection. It is shown that starting from any point of the cone, the process is a semimartingale if < 1, + 0 and not a semimartingale if < < 2.This research is supported by KOSEF grant 941-0100-011-1     

Local time–space stochastic calculus for Lévy processes

We develop a stochastic calculus on the plane with respect to the local times of a large class of Lévy processes. We can then extend to these Lévy processes an Itô formula that was established previously for Brownian motion. Our method provides also a multidimensional version of the formula. We show that this formula generates many “Itô formulas” that fit various problems. In the special case of a linear Brownian motion, we recover a recently established Itô formula that involves local times on curves. This formula is already used in financial mathematics.     

A reflection principle for correlated defaults

The correct valuation of the so-called “correlation products” in the credit risk market such as n$n$-th-to-default swaps or CDOs requires a better understanding of higher dimensional barrier default phenomena. We introduce a reflection principle suited for the pricing of credit derivatives on two securities, paving the way for the development of new methods in the field. For that purpose, we introduce new processes, the distributions of which involve generalized Bessel functions. As an application, we derive a closed formula for second-to-default digital swaps, under the standard Black–Cox hypothesis on the conditions triggering default.     

Bornitude et continuité de la transformation de Lévy en analyse

In our previous papers (Adv. in Math. 138 (1) (1998) 182; Potential Anal. 12 (2000) 419), we have obtained a decomposition of |f|, where f is a function defined on , that is analogous to the one proved by H. Tanaka for martingales (the so-called “Tanaka formula”). More precisely, the decomposition has the form , where is (a variant of ) the density of the area integral associated with f. This functional (introduced by R.F. Gundy in his 1983 paper (The density of area integral, Conference on Harmonic Analysis in Honor of Antoni Zygmund. Wadsworth, Belmont, CA, 1983, pp. 138-149.)) can be viewed as the counterpart of the local time in Euclidean harmonic analysis. In this paper, we are interested in boundedness and continuity properties of the mapping (which we call the Lévy transform in analysis) on some classical function or distribution spaces. As was shown in [4,5], the above (non-linear) decomposition is bounded in L^p for every p∈[1,+∞[, i.e. one has , where C_p is a constant depending only on p. Nevertheless our methods (roughly speaking, the Calderón-Zygmund theory in [4], stochastic calculus and martingale inequalities in [5]) both gave constants C_p whose order of magnitude near 1 is O(1/(p−1)). The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, we improve the preceding result and we answer a natural question, by proving that the best constants C_p are bounded near 1. Second, we prove that the Lévy transform is continuous on the Hardy spaces H^p with p>n/(n+1).