We analyze the term structure of illiquidity premiums as the difference between the yield curves of two major bond segments that are both government guaranteed but differ in their liquidity. We show that its characteristics strongly depend on the economic situation. In crisis times, illiquidity...

We study whether prices of traded options contain information about future extreme market events. Our option-implied conditional expectation of market loss due to tail events, or tail loss measure, predicts future market returns, magnitude, and probability of the market crashes, beyond and above...

We study minute-by-minute behavior of the VIX index and trading activity in the underlying S&P 500 options to understand the impact of macro and microeconomic forces on risk neutral volatility. VIX often increases with macroeconomic news, reflects the credibility of Fed monetary stimulus, and...

This article provides empirical support for the theory that closed-end fund discounts reflect expected investment performance. Evidence is presented to explain how equity closed-end fund initial public offerings (IPOs) can sell at a premium when existing funds sell at a discount and why the...

Using daily options prices on the Eurostoxx 50 stock index over the whole year 2008, we compare the performance of three popular stochastic volatility models (Heston, 1993; Bates, 1996; Heston and Nandi, 2'007, in addition to the traditional Black-Scholes model and a proprietary trading desk model. We...

Implied correlation and variance risk premium stand out in predicting market returns. However, while the predictive ability of implied correlation lasts for up to a year, the variance risk premium predicts market returns only for one quarter ahead. Contrary to the accepted view, implied...

This paper investigates whether ETF returns lead the returns of underlying bonds and similar style bond funds. Bond prices are often stale due to their lack of liquidity, and price discovery may occur in ETFs and then in underlying bonds. As predicted, we find that ETF returns predict its own...

We derive generalized bounds on conditional expected excess returns. The bounds deliver consistent expected returns for individual and index-type assets, are conditionally tight, account for all risk-neutral moments of returns, and outperform runner-up models for out-of-sample predictions....

We evaluate the ability of different asset pricing models to explain the flows into VIX ETPs with long volatility exposure. We find no evidence supporting that investors consider systematic risk when they evaluate VIX ETP performance. Instead, investors appear to follow a simple mean reversion...

We identify a global risk factor in the cross-section of implied volatility returns in currency markets. A zero-cost strategy that buys forward volatility agreements with downward sloping implied volatility curves and sells those with upward slopes - volatility carry strategy - generates...