The illiquidity of long-maturity options has made it difficult to study the term structures of option spanning portfolios. This paper proposes a new estimation and inference framework for these option-implied term structures that addresses long-maturity illiquidity. By building a sieve estimator...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic response of stock market volatility to changes in monetary policy. Using a vector autoregressive model, our findings reveal a significant and asymmetric response of stock returns and volatility to monetary policy shocks. Although the increase in the...

We propose a semiparametric estimator to determine the effects of explanatory variables on the conditional interquantile expectation (IQE) of the random variable of interest, without specifying the conditional distribution of the underlying random variables. IQE is the expected value of the...

We propose a nonparametric Bayesian approach for conducting inference on probabilistic surveys. We use this approach to study whether U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters density projections for output growth and inflation are consistent with the noisy rational expectations hypothesis. We...

The simultaneous occurrence of jumps in several stocks can be associated with major financial news, triggers short-term predictability in stock returns, is correlated with sudden spikes of the variance risk premium, and determines a persistent increase (decrease) of stock variances and...

This paper studies the information content of the S&P 500 and VIX markets on the volatility of the S&P 500 returns. We estimate a flexible affine model based on a joint time series of underlying indexes and option prices on both markets. An extensive model specification analysis reveals that...

Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

This paper provides empirical evidence that volatility markets are integrated through the time-varying term structure of variance risk premia. These risk premia predict the returns from selling volatility for different horizons, maturities, and products, including variance swaps, straddles, and...

We introduce econometric methods to perform estimation and inference on the permanent and transitory components of the stochastic discount factor (SDF) in dynamic Markov environments. The approach is nonparametric in that it does not impose parametric restrictions on the law of motion of the...

For typical sample sizes occurring in economic and financial applications, the squared bias of estimators for the memory parameter is small relative to the variance. Smoothing is therefore a suitable way to improve the performance in terms of the mean squared error. However, in an analysis of...