decomposing realized volatility in its continuous and discontinuous jump component. First, we analyze the relation between … volatility and trading activity. Coherent with existing studies we find that the driving factor of the relation between … Data ; Realized Volatility ; Price Jump ; Trading Activity ; Urgent Market Message …

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 …-form and structural models of stochastic volatility …

We contrast two different asset pricing models, where the pricing kernel either (i) increases in the volatility … dimension, reflecting investors' aversion to volatility, or (ii) could be non-monotonic in volatility, reflecting heterogeneity … in investors' beliefs. The two models yield opposite predictions about volatility tail behavior, whereby the model with …

We propose a model of volatility tail behavior, in which the pricing measure dominates the physical measure in both … tails of the volatility distribution and, hence, the derived pricing kernel exhibits an increasing and decreasing region in … the volatility dimension. The model features investors who have heterogeneity in beliefs about volatility outcomes, and …

We examine the pricing of volatility risk in the cross-section of equity Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) stock … returns over the 1996 – 2010 period. We consider both aggregate (systematic) volatility and firm-specific (idiosyncratic …) volatility. In contrast to the negative and significant price of systematic volatility risk for Non-REIT equities, we find that …

Prior research documents that volatility spreads predict stock returns. If the trading activity of informed investors … is an important driver of volatility spreads, then the predictability of stock returns should be more pronounced during … major information events. This paper investigates whether the predictability of equity returns by volatility spreads is …