For nonnegative local martingales, there is an interesting symmetry between the failure of the martingale property and the possibility of hitting zero, which I will describe now. I will also give a necessary and sufficient condition for solutions to a certain class of stochastic differential equations to hit zero in finite time and, using the aforementioned symmetry, infer a necessary and sufficient condition for the processes to be proper martingales. It is often the case that solutions to SDEs are clearly local martingales, but is hard to tell whether they are proper martingales. So, the martingale condition, given in Theorem 4 below, is a useful result to know. The method described here is relatively new to me, only coming up while preparing the previous post. Applying a hedging argument, it was noted that the failure of the martingale property for solutions to the SDE for
is related to the fact that, for
, the process hits zero. This idea extends to all continuous and nonnegative local martingales. The Girsanov transform method applied here is essentially the same as that used by Carlos A. Sin (Complications with stochastic volatility models, Adv. in Appl. Probab. Volume 30, Number 1, 1998, 256-268) and B. Jourdain (Loss of martingality in asset price models with lognormal stochastic volatility, Preprint CERMICS, 2004-267).
Consider nonnegative solutions to the stochastic differential equation
(1) |
where , B is a Brownian motion and the fixed initial condition
is strictly positive. The multiplier X in the coefficient of dB ensures that if X ever hits zero then it stays there. By time-change methods, uniqueness in law is guaranteed as long as a is nonzero and
is locally integrable on
. Consider also the following SDE,
(2) |
Being integrals with respect to Brownian motion, solutions to (1) and (2) are local martingales. It is possible for them to fail to be proper martingales though, and they may or may not hit zero at some time. These possibilities are related by the following result.
Theorem 1 Suppose that (1) and (2) satisfy uniqueness in law. Then, X is a proper martingale if and only if Y never hits zero. Similarly, Y is a proper martingale if and only if X never hits zero.
Continue reading “Zero-Hitting and Failure of the Martingale Property”