While CBOE’s VIX index is widely acknowledged as a broad-based investor “fear gauge” for its strong inverse relationship with major equity indexes, one cannot necessarily expect it to translate to the level of future turbulence or investor risk-aversion in fixed-income markets. Indeed,...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

In this paper, we price covariance and correlation swaps for financial markets with Markov-modulated volatilities. As an example, we consider stochastic volatility driven by a two-state continuous Markov chain. In this case, numerical examples are presented for VIX and VXN volatility indices...