Using the prices of crude oil futures contracts, we construct the term structure of crude oil convenience yields out to one-year maturity. The crude oil convenience yield can be interpreted as the interest rate, denominated in barrels of oil, for borrowing a single barrel of oil, and it measures...

We find that firm-level variance risk premium, estimated as the difference between option-implied and expected variances, has a prominent explanatory power for credit spreads in the presence of market- and firm-level risk control variables identified in the existing literature. Such a...

The uncertainty around future changes to the Federal Reserve target rate varies over time. In our results, the main driver of uncertainty is a "path" factor signaling information about future policy actions, which is filtered from federal funds futures data. The uncertainty is highest when it...

We investigate how market participants price and manage counterparty risk in the post-crisis period using confidential trade repository data on single-name credit default swap (CDS) transactions. We find that counterparty risk has a modest impact on the pricing of CDS contracts, but a large...

We use non-Gaussian features in U.S. macroeconomic data to identify aggregate supply and demand shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. Recessions in the 1970s and 1980s were driven primarily by supply shocks, later recessions were driven primarily by demand shocks, and the Great...

This paper shows that changes in market participants' fear of rare events implied by crude oil options contribute to oil price volatility and oil return predictability. Using 25 years of historical data, we document economically large tail risk premia that vary substantially over time and...

We introduce the Homoscedastic Gamma [HG] model where the distribution of returns is characterized by its mean, variance and an independent skewness parameter under both measures. The model predicts that the spread between historical and risk-neutral volatilities is a function of the risk...

Many studies have documented that daily realized volatility estimates based on intraday returns provide volatility forecasts that are superior to forecasts constructed from daily returns only. We investigate whether these forecasting improvements translate into economic value added. To do so we...

The paper examines three equity-based structural models to study the nonlinear relationship between equity and credit default swap (CDS) prices. These models differ in the specification of the default barrier. With cross-firm CDS premia and equity information, we are able to estimate and compare...

There is a close link between prices of equity options and the default probability of a firm. We show that in the presence of positive expected equity recovery, standard methods that assume zero equity recovery at default misestimate the option-implied default probability. We introduce a simple...