We show that option-implied tail risk plays an important role in understanding the risk premium around FOMC announcement days. We construct abnormal option-implied moments before each pre-scheduled FOMC meeting. While volatility predicts pre-FOMC drift and the announcement day market returns,...

We identify latent demand and supply in the market for index options using a VAR with sign restrictions. The time series of latent demand conveys important economic insights that are not evident from the analysis of equilibrium quantities. Using observable proxies for risk, we find that demand...

Rather than assuming a fixed recovery rate in estimation, we estimate recovery rates from CDS spreads, using three years of daily data on 152 corporates. We use a quadratic pricing model which ensures nonnegative default probabilities and recovery rates. The estimated cross-section of recovery...

Observable covariates are useful for predicting default under the natural measure, but several findings question their value for explaining credit spreads under the pricing measure. We introduce a discrete time no-arbitrage model with observable covariates, which allows for a closed form...

Many studies have documented that daily realized volatility estimates based on intraday returns provide volatility forecasts that are superior to forecasts constructed from daily returns only. We investigate whether these forecasting improvements translate into economic value added. To do so we...

We develop a GARCH option model with a variance premium by combining the Heston-Nandi (2000) dynamic with a new pricing kernel that nests Rubinstein (1976) and Brennan (1979). While the pricing kernel is monotonic in the stock return and in variance, its projection onto the stock return is...

Equity risk measured by beta is of great interest to both academics and practitioners. Existing estimates of beta use historical returns. Many studies have found option-implied volatility to be a strong predictor of future realized volatility. We find that option-implied volatility and skewness...

This paper investigates the importance of market incompleteness by comparing the rates of risk aversion estimated from complete and incomplete markets environments. For the incomplete-markets case, we use consumption data for the 50 US states. We find that the rate of risk aversion under the...

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...

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...