We construct risk-neutral return probability distributions from S&P 500 options data over the decade 2003 to 2013, separable into pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis regimes. The pre-crisis period is characterized by increasing realized and, especially, option-implied returns. This translates...

We develop the concept of “dragon-kings” corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These dragon-kings reveal the existence of mechanisms of...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

This paper proposes a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set on the three main components used in asset pricing, namely the risk physical and neutral measures and the relative pricing kernel.The analysis is carried out by means of a portfolio optimization...

We propose a nonparametric Bayesian approach for the estimation of the pricing kernel. Historical stock returns and option market data are combined through the Dirichlet Process (DP) to construct an option-adjusted physical measure. The precision parameter of the DP process is calibrated to the...

We show that enhanced stock liquidity increases a firm’s propensity to hold cash using tick-size decimalization for identification. Our finding is surprising in light of the view that improved stock liquidity reduces financial constraints. As an explanation, we propose that there is a...

We propose a model-free method for measuring the jump skewness risk premium via a tradingstrategy. We find that in the S&P 500 option market, the premium is positive and greater inabsolute terms than the variance premium. The trading strategy allows for examining the premiumin different holding...

This research starts from the observation that common desmoothing models are likely to generate some extreme returns. Such returns will distort risk measurement and hence can lead to investment decisions that are suboptimal relative to those that would be made if a transaction based index were...

Using U.S. data for 1986-2017, the paper focuses on the impacts of macroeconomic risk factors and leverage on the performance of the various types of real estate exposure (direct, non-listed, and listed). The response of core funds to economic risk factors is akin to that of direct investments;...

We study general undiscounted asset price processes, which are only assumed to be non- negative, adapted and RCLL (but not a priori semimartingales). Traders are allowed to use simple (piecewise constant) strategies. We prove that under a discounting-invariant condition of absence of arbitrage,...