We document a surprising pattern in market prices of S&P 500 index options. When implied volatilities are graphed against a standard measure of moneyness, the implied volatility smirk does not flatten out as maturity increases up to the observable horizon of two years. This behavior contrasts...

We develop a simple robust test for the presence of continuous and discontinuous (jump) com­ponents in the price of an asset underlying an option. Our test examines the prices of at­the­money and out­of­the­money options as the option maturity approaches zero. We show that these prices...

As is well known, the classic Black­Scholes option pricing model assumes that returns follow Brownian motion. It is widely recognized that return processes differ from this benchmark in at least three important ways. First, asset prices jump, leading to non­normal return innovations. Second,...

We propose a direct and robust method for quantifying the variance risk premium on financial assets. We theoretically and numerically show that the risk-neutral expected value of the return variance, also known as the variance swap rate, is well approximated by the value of a particular...

We consider the hedging of options when the price of the underlying asset is always exposed to the possibility of jumps of random size. Working in a single factor Markovian setting, we derive a new spanning relation between a given option and a continuum of shorter-term options written on the...

While American calls on non-dividend paying stocks may be valued as European, there is no completely explicit exact solution for the values of American puts. We introduce a novel technique called randomization to value American puts and calls on dividend-paying stocks. This technique yields a...