The 1987 market crash was associated with a dramatic and permanent steepening of the implied volatility curve for equity index options, despite minimal changes in aggregate consumption. We explain these events within a general equilibrium framework in which expected endowment growth and economic...

A regime switching model in continuous time is introduced where a variety of jumps are allowed in addition to the diffusive component. The characteristic function of the process is derived in closed form, and is subsequently employed to create the likelihood function. In addition, standard...

This paper presents a new numerical method for pricing American call options when the volatility of the price of the underlying stock is stochastic. By exploiting a log-linear relationship of the optimal exercise boundary with respect to volatility changes, we derive an integral representation...

Financial markets embed expectations of central bank policy into asset prices. This paper compares two approaches that extract a probability density of market beliefs. The first is a simulated moments estimator for option volatilities described in Mizrach (2002); the second is a new approach...