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 introduce tractable models for commodity derivatives pricing with inventory and volatility effects, and illustrate with applications to the oil market. We contribute to the existing literature in several respects. First, whereas the previous literature uses futures data for investigating the...

We use intraday data to compute weekly realized variance, skewness, and kurtosis for equity returns and study the realized moments? time-series and cross-sectional properties. We investigate if this week?'s realized moments are informative for the cross-section of next week'?s stock returns. We...

Yes. We use intraday data to compute weekly realized variance, skewness and kurtosis for individual equities and assess whether this week?s realized moments predict next week?s stock returns in the cross-section. We sort stocks each week according to their past realized moments, form decile...

We survey the theory and empirical evidence on GARCH option valuation models. Our treatment includes the range of functional forms available for the volatility dynamic, multifactor models, nonnormal shock distributions as well as style of pricing kernels typically used. Various strategies for...

This chapter surveys the methods available for extracting forward-looking information from option prices. We consider volatility, skewness, kurtosis, and density forecasting. More generally, we discuss how any forecasting object which is a twice differentiable function of the future realization...

Illiquidity is well-known to be a significant determinant of stock and bond returns. We report on illiquidity premia in the equity options market. An increase in option illiquidity decreases the current option price and implies higher expected option returns. This effect is statistically and...

We characterize diversification in corporate credit using a new class of dynamic copula models which can capture dynamic dependence and asymmetry in large samples of firms. We also document important differences between credit spread and equity return dependence dynamics. Modeling a decade of...

International equity markets are characterized by nonlinear dependence and asymmetries. We propose a new dynamic asymmetric copula model to capture long-run and short-run dependence, multivariate nonnormality, and asymmetries in large cross-sections. We find that copula correlations have...

When the relationship between security prices and state variables in dynamic term structure models is nonlinear, existing studies usually linearize this relationship because nonlinear fi?ltering is computationally demanding. We conduct an extensive investigation of this linearization and analyze...