The skewness in physical distributions of equity index returns and the implied volatility skew in the risk-neutral measure are subjects of extensive academic research. Much attention is now being focused on models that are able to capture time-varying conditional skewness and kurtosis. For this...

This paper provides and empirical examination of four European equity indices between 1991 and 2005. We investigate the ability of fifteen different GARCH models to capture the characteristics of historical daily returns effectively and generate realistic implied volatility skews. Using many...