Traditionally volatility is viewed as a measure of variability, or risk, of an underlying asset. However recently investors began to look at volatility from a different angle. It happened due to emergence of a market for new derivative instruments - variance swaps. In this paper first we...

In this master thesis a mechanism to test mononicity of empirical pricing kernels (EPK) is presented. By testing monotonicity of pricing kernel we can determine whether utility function is concave or not. Strictly decreasing pricing kernel corresponds to concave utility function while...