In this paper, we characterize the asymmetries of the smile through multiple leverage effects in a stochastic dynamic asset pricing framework. The dependence between price movements and future volatility is introduced through a set of latent state variables. These latent variables can capture...

Characterizing asset return dynamics using volatility models is an important part of empirical finance. The existing literature favors some rather complex volatility specifications whose relative performance is usually assessed through their likelihood based on a time-series of asset returns....

In this paper, we consider American option contracts when the underlying asset has stochastic dividends and stochastic volatility. We provide a full discussion of the theoretical foundations of American option valuation and exercise boundaries. We show how they depend on the various sources of...

Prior work on option pricing falls mostly in two categories: it either relies on strong distributional or economical assumptions, or it tries to mimic the Black-Scholes formula through statistical models, trained to fit today's market price based on information available today. The work...

We apply several recently proposed tests for structural breaks in conditional variance and covariance dynamics. The tests apply to both the class of ARCH and SV type processes and allow for long memory features. We also apply them to data-driven volatility estimators using high-frequency data...

We identify and examine the presence of the long memory in equity returns and more generally in specific transformations of these returns, on both the US and European stock markets. Taking into account the persistence phenomenon, we analyze the effect of the splitting of the sample period on the...

The Wishart Autoregressive (WAR) process is a multivariate process of stochastic positive definite matrices. The WAR is proposed in this paper as a dynamic model for stochastic volatility matrices. It yields simple nonlinear forecasts at any horizon and has factor representation, which separates...

In this paper, we introduce a new approach for volatility modeling in discrete and continuous time. We follow the stochastic volatility literature by assuming that the variance is a function of a state variable. However, instead of assuming that the loading function is ad hoc (e.g., exponential...