State-of-the-art stochastic volatility models generate a "volatility smirk" that explains why out-of-the-money index puts have high prices relative to the Black-Scholes benchmark. These models also adequately explain how the volatility smirk moves up and down in response to changes in risk....

We develop a GARCH option model with a new pricing kernel allowing for a variance premium. While the pricing kernel is monotonic in the stock return and in variance, its projection onto the stock return is nonmonotonic. A negative variance premium makes it U shaped. We present new semiparametric...

This paper presents a new model for the valuation of European options, in which the volatility of returns consists of two components. One of these components is a long-run component, and it can be modeled as fully persistent. The other component is short-run and has a zero mean. Our model can be...

Few issues are more important for finance practice than the computation of market betas. Existing approaches compute market betas using historical data. While these approaches differ in terms of statistical sophistication and the modeling of the time-variation in the betas, they are all...

This paper presents a new model for the valuation of European options, in which the volatility of returns consists of two components. One is a long-run component and can be modeled as fully persistent. The other is short-run and has a zero mean. Our model can be viewed as an affine version of...

We provide results for the valuation of European style contingent claims for a large class of specifications of the underlying asset returns. Our valuation results obtain in a discrete time, infinite state-space setup using the no-arbitrage principle and an equivalent martingale measure. Our...

Equity risk measured by beta is of great interest to both academics and practitioners. Existing estimates of beta use historical returns. Many studies have found option-implied volatility to be a strong predictor of future realized volatility. We .nd that option-implied volatility and skewness...

Standard empirical investigations of jump dynamics in returns and volatility are fairly complicated due to the presence of latent continuous-time factors. We present a new discrete-time framework that combines heteroskedastic processes with rich specifications of jumps in returns and volatility....

The extended Kalman filter, which linearizes the relationship between security prices and state variables, is widely used in fixed income applications. We investigate if the unscented Kalman filter should be used to capture nonlinearities, and compare the performance of the Kalman filter to that...