Undiscounted Markov chain BSDEs to stopping times

Abstract

We consider backward stochastic differential equations in a setting where noise is generated by a countable state, continuous time Markov chain, and the terminal value is prescribed at a stopping time. We show that, given sufficient integrability of the stopping time and a growth bound on the terminal value and BSDE driver, these equations admit unique solutions satisfying the same growth bound (up to multiplication by a constant). This holds without assuming that the driver is monotone in y, that is, our results do not require that the terminal value be discounted at some uniform rate. We show that the conditions are satisfied for hitting times of states of the chain, and hence present some novel applications of the theory of these BSDEs.