Inspired by the theory of social imitation (Weidlich 1970) and its adaptation to financial markets by the Coherent Market Hypothesis (Vaga 1990), we present a behavioral model of stock prices that supports the overreaction hypothesis. Using our dynamic stock price model, we develop a two factor...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

We present a unified, market-complete model that integrates both Bachelier and Black- Scholes-Merton frameworks for asset pricing. The model allows for the study, within a unified framework, of asset pricing in a natural world that experiences the possibility of negative security prices or...

We study the consequences of trading fragmentation and speed on liquidity and asset prices. Trading venues invest in speed-enhancing technologies and price trading services to attract investors. Investors trade due to preference shocks. We show how the resulting market organization affects asset...

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...

We propose a nonparametric Bayesian approach for the estimation of the pricing kernel. Historical stock returns and option market data are combined through the Dirichlet Process (DP) to construct an option-adjusted physical measure. The precision parameter of the DP process is calibrated to the...

The article presents a Bayesian nonparametric approach to model the Pricing Kernel (PK), defined as the present value of the ratio between the risk neutral density, q, and a modified physical density, p*. The risk neutral density is estimated from option data and the modified physical density is...

This paper decomposes the risk premia of individual stocks into contributions from systematic and idiosyncratic risks. I introduce an affine jump-diffusion model, which accounts for both the factor structure of asset returns and that of the variance of idiosyncratic returns. The estimation is...

This paper analyzes a general equilibrium exchange economy with a continuum of agents who have "catching up with the Joneses" preferences and differ with respect to the curvature of their utility functions and - as a peculiarity - the impact of news about uncertainty. The dynamic redistribution...