Market option prices in last 20 years confirmed deviations from the Black and Scholes (BS) models assumptions, especially on the BS implied volatility. Implied binomial trees (IBT) models capture the variations of the implied volatility known as "volatility smile". They provide a discrete...

Market option prices in last 20 years confirmed deviations from the Black and Scholes (BS) models assumptions, especially on the BS implied volatility. Implied binomial trees (IBT) models capture the variations of the implied volatility known as "volatility smile". They provide a discrete...

The Markov Tree model is a discrete-time option pricing model that accounts for short-term memory of the underlying asset. In this work, we compare the empirical performance of the Markov Tree model against that of the Black-Scholes model and Heston's stochastic volatility model. Leveraging a...

Are options on more volatile assets expected to provide higher or lower return? Using analytics, we show the ambiguous nature of the answer when the volatility differential is due to the systematic/priced risk. Here the difference in the expected return of the assets also matters and has an...

This paper presents the first comparison of the accuracy of density forecasts for stock prices. Six sets of forecasts are evaluated for DJIA stocks, across four forecast horizons. Two forecasts are risk-neutral densities implied by the Black-Scholes and Heston models. The third set are...

In recent years there has been a remarkable growth of volatility options. In particular, VIX options are among the most actively trading contracts at CBOE. These options exhibit upward sloping volatility skew and the shape of the skew is largely independent of the volatility level. To take into...

I show that the inventory risk faced by market-makers has a first-order effect on option prices. I introduce a simple approach that decomposes the price impact of trades into inventory risk and asymmetric information components. While both components are large for option trades, the inventory...

We introduce a discrete-time model for log-return dynamics with observable volatility and jumps. Our proposal extends the class of Realized Volatility heterogeneous auto-regressive gamma (HARG) processes adding a jump component with time-varying intensity. The model is able to reproduce the...

This paper studies the nonparametric identification and estimation of projected pricing kernels implicit in European option prices and underlying asset returns using conditional moment restrictions. The proposed series estimator avoids computing ratios of estimated risk-neutral and physical...