Option market prices have often been regarded as a window on investor sentiment about the future price behavior of the underlying asset. Such prices can be very different from model prices and have long been noted by implied volatility plots revealing “smiles” or “smirks”. In this paper...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

This paper presents a tractable model of non-linear dynamics of market returns using a Langevin approach.Due to non-linearity of an interaction potential, the model admits regimes of both small and large return fluctuations. Langevin dynamics are mapped onto an equivalent quantum mechanical (QM)...