Illiquidity is well-known to be a signi?cant determinant of stock and bond returns. We report on illiquidity premia in equity option markets. An increase in option illiquidity decreases the current option price and predicts higher expected option returns. This effect is statistically and...

Illiquidity is well-known to be a significant determinant of stock and bond returns. We report on illiquidity premia in the equity options market. An increase in option illiquidity decreases the current option price and implies higher expected option returns. This effect is statistically and...

We characterize diversification in corporate credit using a new class of dynamic copula models which can capture dynamic dependence and asymmetry in large samples of firms. We also document important differences between credit spread and equity return dependence dynamics. Modeling a decade of...

International equity markets are characterized by nonlinear dependence and asymmetries. We propose a new dynamic asymmetric copula model to capture long-run and short-run dependence, multivariate nonnormality, and asymmetries in large cross-sections. We find that copula correlations have...

Principal component analysis of equity options on Dow-Jones firms reveals a strong factor structure. The first principal component explains 77% of the variation in the equity volatility level, 77% of the variation in the equity option skew, and 60% of the implied volatility term structure across...

When the relationship between security prices and state variables in dynamic term structure models is nonlinear, existing studies usually linearize this relationship because nonlinear fi?ltering is computationally demanding. We conduct an extensive investigation of this linearization and analyze...

Forecasting the evolution of security co-movements is critical for asset pricing and portfolio allocation. Hence, we investigate patterns and trends in correlations over time using weekly returns for developed markets (DMs) and emerging markets (EMs) during the period 1973-2012. We show that it...

The extended Kalman filter, which linearizes the relationship between security prices and state variables, is widely used in fixed income applications. We investigate if the unscented Kalman filter should be used to capture nonlinearities, and compare the performance of the Kalman filter to that...