For centuries, Jews in Europe have specialized in financial services. At the same time, they have been the victims of historical antisemitism on the part of the Christian majority. We find that present-day financial development is lower in German counties where historical antisemitism was...

Using intraday transaction prices and a non-parametric jump test, we show that jumps in the S&P 500 and VIX are low-probability, high-impact events. Extant research investigating the causes of jumps primarily focuses on scheduled macro-announcements. However, we find that unscheduled news, which...

In this paper, we study the asset pricing implications of persistence in the risk-neutral return distribution's central moments. We detect a both economically and statistically significant premium of stocks with low over stocks with high such persistence. Annual value-weighted excess...

This paper characterizes the dynamics of jumps and analyzes their importance for volatility forecasting. Using high-frequency data on four prominent energy markets, we perform a model-free decomposition of realized variance into its continuous and discontinuous components. We find strong...

We analyze the risk premia embedded in the S&P 500 spot index and option markets. We use a long time-series of spot prices and a large panel of option prices to jointly estimate the diffusive stock risk premium, the Price jump risk premium, the diffusive variance risk premium and the variance...

In this paper, we study jumps in commodity prices. Unlike assumed in existing models of commodity price dynamics, a simple analysis of the data reveals that the probability of tail events is not constant but depends on the time of the year, i.e. exhibits seasonality. We propose a stochastic...