Krein's Theory applied to fluctuations of Lévy processes

Abstract

We give an interpretation of the bilateral exit problem for Lévy processes via the study of an elementary Markov chain. We exhibit a strong connection between this problem and Krein's theory on strings. For instance, for symmetric Lévy processes with bounded variations, the Lévy exponent is the correspondant spectral density and the Wiener-Hopf factorization turns out to be a version of Krein's entropy formula.