Prior work on option pricing falls mostly in two categories: it either relies on strong distributional or economical assumptions, or it tries to mimic the Black-Scholes formula through statistical models, trained to fit today's market price based on information available today. The work...

Characterizing asset return dynamics using volatility models is an important part of empirical finance. The existing literature favors some rather complex volatility specifications whose relative performance is usually assessed through their likelihood based on a time-series of asset returns....

In this paper, we consider American option contracts when the underlying asset has stochastic dividends and stochastic volatility. We provide a full discussion of the theoretical foundations of American option valuation and exercise boundaries. We show how they depend on the various sources of...

In this paper, we characterize the asymmetries of the smile through multiple leverage effects in a stochastic dynamic asset pricing framework. The dependence between price movements and future volatility is introduced through a set of latent state variables. These latent variables can capture...

This paper addresses the case when stock market returns are assumed being generated through a factorial structure. High levels of idiosyncratic risk are shown to exist for most stocks on the US market, when CAPM or APT are used for the estimation of diversifiable risks. The presence of these...

Business surveys aim at getting, as quickly and as simply as possible, the recent and probable changes in economic activity. Answers to most of the questions are qualitative with three modalities (qualification of an evolution: up / stable / down). The qualitative indicators provided by these...