Pricing Discretely Monitored Barrier Options and Credit Default Swaps under Lévy Processes

We introduce a new, fast and accurate method to calculate prices and sensitivities of European vanilla and digital options under the Variance Gamma model. For near at-the-money options of short maturity, our method is much faster than those based on discretization and truncation of the inverse Fourier transform integral (iFT method). We show that the results calculated with our method agree with those obtained with the iFT algorithm using very long and fine grids. Taking the results of our method as a benchmark, we show that the parabolic modification of the iFT method (Boyarchenko and Levendorskiĭ, 2012) is much more efficient than the standard (flat) version. Based on this conclusion, we consider an approach which uses a combination of backward induction and parabolic iFT to price discretely monitored barrier options, as well as credit default swaps, under wide classes of Lévy models. At each step of backward induction, we use piece-wise polynomial interpolation and parabolic iFT, which allows for efficient error control. We derive accurate recommendations for the choice of parameters of the numerical scheme, and produce numerical examples showing that oversimplified prescriptions in other methods can result in large errors.