Traditional …financial theory predicts that comovement in asset returns is due to fundamentals. An alternative view is that of Barberis and Shleifer (2003) and Bar- beris, Shleifer and Wurgler (2005) who propose a sentiment based theory of comovement, delinking it from fundamentals. In their...

Using a new dataset of bid and offer quotes for credit default swaps, we investigate the relationship between theoretical determinants of default risk and actual market premia using cross sectional regressions. These theoretical determinants are variance risk premia, implied volatility and the...

We document the numerical aspects of the calibration of cross-currency options on the local volatility framework. We consider the partial differential equation satisfied by the price of the cross-currency option and see that the most important specifications to set are the boundary conditions....

We document the calibration of the local volatility in terms of local and implied instantaneous variances; we first explore the theoretical properties of the method for a particular class of volatilities. We confirm the theoretical results through a numerical procedure which uses a Gauss-Newton...

The current financial crisis offers a unique opportunity to investigate the leading properties of market indicators in a stressed environment and their usefulness from a banking supervision perspective. One pool of relevant information that has been little explored in the empirical literature is...

This article brings new insights on the role played by (implied) volatility on the WTI crude oil spot price. An increase in the volatility subsequent to an increase in the oil price (i.e. inverse leverage effect) remains the dominant effect as it might reflect the fear of oil consumers to face...