Principal component analysis of equity options on Dow-Jones firms reveals a strong factor structure. The first principal component explains 77% of the variation in the equity volatility level, 77% of the variation in the equity option skew, and 60% of the implied volatility term structure across...

We propose a simple model in which realized stock market return volatility and implied volatility backed out of option prices are subject to common level shifts corresponding to movements between bull and bear markets. The model is estimated using the Kalman filter in a generalization to the...

We study the risk premium and leverage effect in the S&P500 market using the stochastic volatility-in-mean model of Barndor¤-Nielsen & Shephard (2001). The Merton (1973, 1980) equilibrium asset pricing condition linking the conditional mean and conditional variance of discrete time returns is...

We include simultaneously both realized volatility measures based on high-frequency asset returns and implied volatilities backed out of individual traded at the money option prices in a state space approach to the analysis of true underlying volatility. We model integrated volatility as a...

We analyze the high-frequency dynamics of S&P 500 equity-index option prices by constructing an assortment of implied volatility measures. This allows us to infer the underlying fine structure behind the innovations in the latent state variables driving the movements of the volatility surface....

What role does labor play in a firm's market value? We explore this question using a production-based asset pricing model with frictions in the adjustment of both capital and labor. We posit that hiring of labor is akin to investment in capital and that the two interact, with the interaction...

This paper finds empirical support for the habit persistence model of Camp- bell and Cochrane (1999) along both cross sectional and time-series dimensions of the US stock market. GMM estimations show that the model is able to explain a substantial part of the cross sectional variation of returns...

We suggest an iterated GMM approach to estimate and test the consumption based habit persistence model of Campbell and Cochrane (1999), and we apply the approach on annual and quarterly Danish stock and bond returns. For comparative purposes we also estimate and test the standard CRRA model. In...

By using a beginning-of-period timing convention for consumption, and by including the Great Depression years in the analysis, we show that on annual data from 1926 to 2009 a standard contemporaneous consumption risk model goes a long way in explaining the size and value premiums in...