It is a well known fact that at high sampling frequencies, the contamination of microstructure noise causes the Realized Variance to be a biased measure of the Integrated Variance. Recent developments in this field propose sampling on lower frequencies, sub-sampling techniques, or bias...

In this paper, we investigate the importance of different loss functions when estimating and evaluating option pricing models. Our analysis shows that it is important to take into account parameter uncertainty, since this leads to uncertainty in the predicted option price. We illustrate the...

This paper develops and tests a heterogeneous agents model for the option market. Contrary to the common practice in the heterogeneous agents literature of modeling the level process, we introduce heterogeneity and switching in the variance process of the stock market. The market consists of two...

This paper presents a framework based on correlation analysis to test for contagion during the episode of financial turmoil surrounding the Asian crisis. In particular, we calculate conditional and unconditional correlation coefficients for 15 countries. We advocate the use of synchronous...

In this paper we investigate the ability of different models to produce useful VaR-estimates for exchange rate positions. We make a distinction between models that include sophisticated tail properties and models that do not. The former type of models often leads to too extreme VaR-estimates,...

This paper empirically investigates a method to quantify volatility using the information content of index options. We derive the parameters of a GARCH option pricing model from the term structure of the observed market smile of DAX 30 index. We find the EGARCH option pricing model (Duan, 1995)...

In this paper we investigate the ability of different models to produce useful VaR-estimates for exchange rate positions. We make a distinction between models that include sophisticated tail properties and models that do not. The former type of models often leads to too extreme VaR-estimates,...

The current paper proposes a conditional volatility model with time varying coefficients based on a multinomial switching mechanism. By giving more weight to either the persistence or shock term in a GARCH model, conditional on their relative ability to forecast a benchmark volatility measure,...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate option pricing performance on the cross sectional level. For this purpose, we propose a statistical framework, in which we in particular account for the uncertainty associated with the reported pricing performance. Instead of a single figure, we...

In this paper, we conduct skewness term structure tests to check whether the temporal structure of risk-neutral skewness is consistent with rational expectations. Because risk-neutral skewness is substantially mean reverting, skewness shocks should decay quickly and risk-neutral skewness of more...