There is ample historical data to suggest that log returns of stocks and indices are not independent and identically distributed Normally, as is commonly assumed. Instead, the returns of financial assets are skewed and have higher kurtosis. To account for skewness and excess kurtosis, it is...

The VIX index measures the one-month risk-neutral forward volatility of the S&P500 (SPX) index. While Lévy processes such as the CGMY process can price options on the underlying stock or index, they implicitly assume a constant forward volatility. This makes them unsuitable for pricing options...

We entertain the hypothesis that leverage considerations are relevant in describing the evolution of asset returns both statistically and risk neutrally. Adopting a constant elasticity of variance formulation in the context of a general Levy process as the driving uncertainty we show that the...