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This thesis is composed of two parts. The first parts deals with a technique for pricing American-style contingent options. The second part details a statistical arbitrage model using statistical process control approaches. We propose a novel simulation approach for pricing American-style contingent claims. We develop an adaptive policy search algorithm for obtaining the optimal policy in exercising an American-style option. The option price is first obtained by estimating the optimal option exercising policy and then evaluating the option with the estimated policy through simulation. Both high-biased and low-biased estimators of the option price are obtained. We show that the proposed algorithm leads to convergence to the true optimal policy with probability one. This policy search algorithm requires little knowledge about the structure of the optimal policy and can be naturally implemented using parallel computing methods. As illustrative examples, computational results on pricing regular American options and American-Asian options are reported and they indicate that our algorithm is faster than certain alternative American option pricing algorithms reported in the literature. Secondly, we investigate arbitrage opportunities arising from continuous monitoring of the price difference of highly correlated assets. By differentiating between two assets, we can separate common macroeconomic factors that influence the asset price movements from an idiosyncratic condition that can be monitored very closely by itself. Since price movements are in line with macroeconomic conditions such as interest rates and economic cycles, we can easily see out of the normal behaviors on the price changes. We apply a statistical process control approach for monitoring time series with the serially correlated data. We use various variance estimators to set up and establish trading strategy thresholds.

The Emission Trading Scheme for green house gases is a key tool of European climate protection. Including the road transport sector might be a promising strategy to limit its CO2 emissions. This could be realized within a common market (trans-sectoral trading permitted) or separated markets (trans-sectoral trading not permitted). Starting from different assumptions on emission reduction objectives, the impact of both options is analyzed using a quantitative model. Although an emission trading scheme is ecologically effective regardless of the trading model, it turns out that CO2 emissions and emission allowance prices differ strongly between both design options due to sector specific price elasticities of allowance demand. (authors' abstract)