Interest Rate Caps "Smile" Too! But Can the LIBOR Market Models Capture the Smile?

Using 3 years of interest rate caps price data, we provide a comprehensive documentation of volatility smiles in the caps market. To capture the volatility smiles, we develop a multifactor term structure model with stochastic volatility and jumps that yields a closed-form formula for cap prices. We show that although a three-factor stochastic volatility model can price at-the-money caps well, significant negative jumps in interest rates are needed to capture the smile. The volatility smile contains information that is not available using only at-the-money caps, and this information is important for understanding term structure models. Copyright 2007 by The American Finance Association.