The Heston stochastic volatility model has a boundary trace at zero volatility (2004.00444v1)

Abstract: We establish boundary regularity results in H\"older spaces for the degenerate parabolic problem obtained from the Heston stochastic volatility model in Mathematical Finance set up in the spatial domain (upper half-plane) $\mathbb{H} = \mathbb{R}\times (0,\infty)\subset \mathbb{R}^2$. Starting with nonsmooth initial data $u_0\in H$, we take advantage of smoothing properties of the parabolic semigroup $\mathrm{e}^{-t\mathcal{A}}\colon H\to H$, $t\in \mathbb{R}_+$, generated by the Heston model, to derive the smoothness of the solution $u(t) = \mathrm{e}^{-t\mathcal{A}} u_0$ for all $t>0$. The existence and uniqueness of a weak solution is obtained in a Hilbert space $H = L^2(\mathbb{H};\mathfrak{w})$ with very weak growth restrictions at infinity and on the boundary $\partial\mathbb{H} = \mathbb{R}\times { 0}\subset \mathbb{R}^2$ of the half-plane $\mathbb{H}$. We investigate the influence of the boundary behavior of the initial data $u_0\in H$ on the boundary behavior of $u(t)$ for $t>0$.