This paper implements a model-free approach to measure the market price of the variance risk. In this approach, the value of the variance contract is estimated from prices of traded options. We find that the variance risk is priced, its risk premium is negative and economically very large. In...

We present a market microstructure model to examine specialist's strategic participation decisions in a security market where there are noise traders, limit order traders, an insider and a specialist. We argue that the specialist's participation rate depends on the depth of the limit book and...

This paper proposes a novel nonparametric method to recover the implied risk-neutral density (RND) from option prices. The main advantages of this method are that it 1) is almost completely agnostic about the true underlying process, 2) controls against overfitting while allowing for small...

This paper studies the quot;overpriced puts puzzle'' -- the finding that historical prices of the Samp;P 500 put options have been too high and incompatible with the canonical asset-pricing models, such as CAPM and Rubinstein (1976) model. To investigate whether put returns could be rationalized...

This paper proposes a new nonparametric method for estimating the conditional risk-neutral density (RND) from a cross-section of option prices. The idea of the method is to fit option prices by finding the optimal density in a special admissible set. The admissible set consists of functions,...

This paper introduces the concept of a statistical arbitrage opportunity (SAO). In a finite-horizon economy, an SAO is a zero-cost trading strategy for which i) the expected payoff is positive, and ii) the conditional expected payoff in each final state of the economy is nonnegative. Unlike a...

This paper develops a dynamic market microstructure model of liquidity provision in which M strategic market makers compete in price schedules for order flow from informed and uninformed traders. In equilibrium, market makers post price schedules that are steeper than efficient ones, and the...

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....

The VPIN, or Volume-synchronized Probability of INformed trading, metric is introduced by Easley, Lopez de Prado and O'Hara (ELO) as a real-time indicator of order flow toxicity. They find the measure useful in predicting return volatility and conclude it may help signal impending market...