Speaker

  • Prof Erik Schlรถgl

    Prof Erik Schlögl

Erik Schlรถgl is Professor and Director of the Quantitative Finance Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia. Erik received his doctorate in Economics from the University of Bonn, Germany, for work on term structure models and the pricing of fixed income derivatives and has gained broad-based experience in computational financial engineering. He has consulted for government and financial institutions and software developers in Europe, Australia and in the US, and served as an expert witness in cases before the Federal Court of Australia. His research interests cover a broad area of quantitative finance, in particular model calibration, interest rate term structure modelling, credit risk and the integration of multiple sources of risk. His research articles have been published in a number of international journals, including Finance and Stochastics, Quantitative Finance, Risk and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. He is also the chairman of the organising committee of the Sydney Financial Mathematics Workshop (SFMW) and one of the co-organisers of the annual conference Quantitative Methods in Finance (QMF). In addition to UTS, he held positions at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and the University of Bonn, Germany.

Abstract

The Secured Overnight Funding Rate (SOFR) is becoming the main Riskโ€“Free Rate benchmark in US dollars, thus interest rate term structure models need to be updated to reflect the key features exhibited by the dynamics of SOFR and the forward rates implied by SOFR futures. Historically, interest rate term structure modelling has been based on rates of substantially longer time to maturity than overnight, but with SOFR the overnight rate now is the primary market observable. This means that the empirical idiosyncrasies of the overnight rate cannot be ignored when constructing interest rate models in a SOFRโ€“based world.


As a rate reflecting transactions in the Treasury overnight repurchase market, the dynamics of SOFR are closely linked to the dynamics Effective Federal Funds Rate (EFFR), which is the interest rate most directly impacted by US monetary policy target rate decisions. Therefore, these rates feature jumps at known times (Federal Open Market Committee meeting dates), and market expectations of these jumps are reflected in prices for futures written on these rates. On the other hand, forward rates implied by Fed Funds and SOFR futures continue to evolve diffusively. The model presented in this paper reflects the key empirical features of SOFR dynamics and is calibrated to futures prices. In particular, the model reconciles diffusive forward rate dynamics with piecewise constant paths of the target short rate.


Joint work with Karol Gellert.

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