The notion of model-free implied volatility (MFIV), constituting the basis for the highly publicized VIX volatility index, can be hard to measure with accuracy due to the lack of precise prices for options with strikes in the tails of the return distribution. This is reflected in practice as the...

The LIBOR market model is very popular for pricing interest rate derivatives, but is known to have several pitfalls. In addition, if the model is driven by a jump process, then the complexity of the drift term is growing exponentially fast (as a function of the tenor length). In this work, we...

Stock market volatility clusters in time, carries a risk premium, is fractionally integrated, and exhibits asymmetric leverage effects relative to returns. This paper develops a first internally consistent equilibrium based explanation for these longstanding empirical facts. The model is cast in...

The dynamic dependencies in financial market volatility are generally well described by a long-memory fractionally integrated process. At the same time, the volatility risk premium, defined as the difference between the ex-post realized volatility and the market’s ex-ante expectation thereof,...

Motivated by the implications from a stylized self-contained general equilibrium model incorporating the effects of time-varying economic uncertainty, we show that the difference between implied and realized variation, or the variance risk premium, is able to explain a non-trivial fraction of...

In the present paper we suggest to model Realized Volatility, an estimate of daily volatility based on high frequency data, as an Inverse Gaussian distributed variable with time varying mean, and we examine the joint properties of Realized Volatility and asset returns. We derive the appropriate...

While stochastic volatility models improve on the option pricing error when compared to the Black-Scholes-Merton model, mispricings remain. This paper uses mixed normal heteroskedasticity models to price options. Our model allows for significant negative skewness and time varying higher order...

In recent years multivariate models for asset returns have received much attention, in particular this is the case for models with time varying volatility. In this paper we consider models of this class and examine their potential when it comes to option pricing. Specifically, we derive the risk...

This paper uses asymmetric heteroskedastic normal mixture models to fit return data and to price options. The models can be estimated straightforwardly by maximum likelihood, have high statistical fit when used on S&P 500 index return data, and allow for substantial negative skewness and time...