The illiquidity of long-maturity options has made it difficult to study the term structures of option spanning portfolios. This paper proposes a new estimation and inference framework for these option-implied term structures that addresses long-maturity illiquidity. By building a sieve estimator...

This paper shows that the VIX market contains information on the variance of the S&P 500 returns, which is not already spanned by the S&P 500 market. We estimate a flexible affine model based on a joint time series of underlying indexes and option prices on both markets. We find that including...

In this paper we present a tree model for defaultable bond prices which can be used for the pricing of credit derivatives. The model is based upon the two-factor Hull-White (1994) model for default-free interest rates, where one of the factors is taken to be the credit spread of the defaultable...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of trading in the sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) market, using weekly data for single-name sovereign CDS from October 2008 to September 2015. We describe the anatomy of the sovereign CDS market, derive a law of motion for gross...

This paper studies the information content of the S&P 500 and VIX markets on the volatility of the S&P 500 returns. We estimate a flexible affine model based on a joint time series of underlying indexes and option prices on both markets. An extensive model specification analysis reveals that...

This paper decomposes the risk premia of individual stocks into contributions from systematic and idiosyncratic risks. I introduce an affine jump-diffusion model, which accounts for both the factor structure of asset returns and that of the variance of idiosyncratic returns. The estimation is...

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...

Supported by empirical examples, this paper provides a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set for the estimation of the empirical pricing kernel and, more in general, for the validity of the fundamental theorems of asset pricing. While inferring the...

Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

The forward premium puzzle (FPP) is the negative correlation between the forward premium and the realized exchange rate return at maturities of a month and beyond. Some recent evidence shows that at maturities of multiple years and at the highest intra day frequency the correlation is positive...