Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-stochastic-differential-equations-and-brownian-motion-in-complex-analysis-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2010/a/3/solution

Put and . In the two-variable Itô formula, has finite variation, while the only nonzero quadratic term is . Therefore
This proves the stochastic exponential solves the equation. Its initial value is ; no normalization was stipulated.
The resulting process is initially a continuous local martingale. Since and ,
A bounded local martingale is a true martingale: apply the martingale identity to a localizing sequence and use dominated convergence in conditional expectations. The deterministic bound works on every finite horizon, proving is a martingale on every . The bound on also gives a positive deterministic lower bound , although the upper bound already proves the martingale assertion.

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