Empirical studies have shown that implied volatilities of long-term options react quite strongly to changes in implied volatilities of short-term options and do not display the rationally expected smoothing behavior. Given the observed strong mean-reversion in volatility, those findings have...

We proxy uncertainty in the stock, oil and gold markets with the variance risk premia, extracted from futures and option contracts. We observe that an independent increase in the stock, oil or gold markets uncertainty coincides with negative returns in different industries. However, only the...