Stochastic Volatility and Jump-Diffusion --- Implications on Option Pricing

This paper conducts a thorough and detailed investigation on the implications of stochastic volatility and random jump on option prices. Both stochastic volatility and jump-diffusion processes admit asymmetric and fat-tailed distribution of asset returns and thus have similar impact on option prices compared to the Black-Scholes model. While the dynamic properties of stochastic volatility model are shown to have more impact on long-term options, the random jump is shown to have relatively larger impact on short-term near-the-money options. The misspecification risk of stochastic volatility as jump is minimal in terms of option pricing errors only when both the level of kurtosis of the underlying asset return distribution and the level of volatility persistence are low. While both asymmetric volatility and asymmetric jump can induce distortion of option pricing errors, the skewness of jump offers better explanations to empirical findings on implied volatility curves