Expected returns vary when investors face time-varying investment opportunities. Longrun risk models (Bansal and Yaron 2004) and no-arbitrage affine models (Duffie, Pan, and Singleton 2000) emphasize sources of risk that are not observable to the econometrician. We show that, for both classes of...

Many studies have documented that daily realized volatility estimates based on intraday returns provide volatility forecasts that are superior to forecasts constructed from daily returns only. We investigate whether these forecasting improvements translate into economic value added. To do so we...

We provide a decomposition of nominal yields into real yields, expectations of future inflation and inflation risk premiums when real bonds or inflation swaps are unavailable or unreliable due to their relative illiquidity. We combine nominal yields with surveys of inflation forecasts within a...

This paper addresses an existing gap in the developing literature on conditional skewness. We develop a simple procedure to evaluate parametric conditional skewness models. This procedure is based on regressing the realized skewness measures on model-implied conditional skewness values. We find...

We measure uncertainty surrounding the central bank's future policy rates using implied volatility computed from interest rate option prices and realized volatility computed from intraday prices of interest rate futures. Both volatility measures show that uncertainty decreased following the most...

Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) show that (i) lagged forward rates improve the predictability of annual bond returns, adding to current forward rates, and that (ii) a Markovian model for monthly forward rates cannot generate the pattern of predictability in annual returns. These results stand as a...

Plain vanilla options have a single underlying asset and a single condition on the payoff at the expiration date. For this class of options, a well-known result of Duffie, Pan and Singleton (2000) shows how to invert the characteristic function to obtain a closed-form formula for their prices....

We decompose the variance risk premium into upside and downside variance risk premia. These components reflect market compensation for changes in good and bad uncertainties. Their difference is a measure of the skewness risk premium (SRP), which captures asymmetric views on favorable versus...

Under very general conditions, the total quadratic variation of a jump-diffusion process can be decomposed into diffusive volatility and squared jump variation. We use this result to develop a new option valuation model in which the underlying asset price exhibits volatility and jump intensity...

We introduce the Homoscedastic Gamma [HG] model where the distribution of returns is characterized by its mean, variance and an independent skewness parameter under both measures. The model predicts that the spread between historical and risk-neutral volatilities is a function of the risk...