One explanation for the usefulness of financial variables as tools for economic forecasting is that they embody the expectations of economic agents about the future state of the economy. In this paper, we test whether interest rate volatility contains information on the expectations of agents...

A new methodology to construct synthetic volatility derivatives is presented. The underlying asset price process is very general, since equity, commodities and interest rates are included. The focus is on volatility swaps and volatility swap options, but much more derivatives may be considered....