The Bilateral Gamma Process with Drift Switching and Its Applications to Finance

This paper studies an extension of the bilateral gamma process assuming that the drift coefficient may jump at an exponentially distributed random time. The drift switching can reflect the symmetry between major economic events and moves of financial market indexes. The bilateral gamma distribution has an asymmetric form and fits well with different financial data when there are not external shocks. As the main results, we provide exact formulas for the probability density and incomplete moment-generating functions of the stated process. The expressions found are used for risk measurement and European option pricing. The new formulas are determined in particular by values of the incomplete gamma, Whittaker and confluent hypergeometric functions. Numerical examples of the computations are also afforded. The computation time for the formulas is under 4 s in a compiler compatible with MatLab.