This article describes the primary uses of the VIX index in the financial literature, offering for the first time a joint view of its successes and failures in key financial areas. VIX is a model-free volatility index that measures the investor "fear" gauge due to its significant and negative...

A new economic revolution liberating financial markets? Seeks to answer some of the questions driving the existential crisis embroiling finance: What is currency? What is value? What is a business? What is a bank, even?This article discusses how regulatory reform, transformative technologies,...

We explain the importance of Market Microstructure in the study of the Financial Markets, and then describe the Market Participants who collectively comprise the Financial Market. After a short history of capital markets, we describe the transition of the trading activities from the physical...

We measure investors' short- and long-term stock-return expectations using both options and survey data. These expectations at different horizons reveal what investors think their own short-term expectations will be in the future, or forward return expectations. While contemporaneous short-term...

Understanding the nature of credit risk has important implications for financial stability. Since authorities notably, central banks focus on risks that have systemic implications, it is crucial to develop ways to measure these risks. The difficulty lies in finding reliable measures of aggregate...

Understanding the nature of credit risk has important implications for financial stability. Since authorities notably, central banks focus on risks that have systemic implications, it is crucial to develop ways to measure these risks. The difficulty lies in finding reliable measures of aggregate...

The paper proposes a financial market model that generates stochastic volatility and stochastic interest rate using a minimal number of factors that characterise the dynamics of the different denominations of the deflator. It models asset prices essentially as functionals of square root and...

This paper introduces a benchmark model for financial markets, which is based on the unique characterization of a benchmark portfolio that is chosen to be the growth optimal portfolio. The general structure of risk premia for asset prices and portfolios is derived. Furthermore, the short rate is...

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...

In this paper we introduce a discrete time pricing model for a European call option when the log-return of the underlying stock (asset) is subject to discontinuous market regime type of shifts in its mean or volatility whose risk can be priced in the market. The paper shows how to estimate this...