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....

We show that the compensation for rare events accounts for a large fraction of the equity and variance risk premia in the S&P 500 market index. The probability of rare events vary significantly over time, increasing in periods of high market volatility, but the risk premium for tail events...

Recent research has focused on modelling asset prices by Itô semimartingales. In such a modelling framework, the quadratic variation consists of a continuous and a jump component. This paper is about inference on the jump part of the quadratic variation, which can be estimated by the difference...

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...

We propose a new and flexible non-parametric framework for estimating the jump tails of Itô semimartingale processes. The approach is based on a relatively simple-to-implement set of estimating equations associated with the compensator for the jump measure, or its "intensity", that only...

This paper reviews basic notions of return variation in the context of a continuous-time arbitrage-free asset pricing model and discusses some of their applications. We first define return variation in the infeasible continuous-sampling case. Then we introduce realized measures obtained from...