The illiquidity of long-maturity options has made it difficult to study the term structures of option spanning portfolios. This paper proposes a new estimation and inference framework for these option-implied term structures that addresses long-maturity illiquidity. By building a sieve estimator...

A contingent claims valuation model which allows to highlight the implications of program trading in spot markets for the pricing of European-style foreign currency options and for the volatility strike structure implicit in these contracts is devoloped. The curvature of the volatility strike...

In this paper, we modify Duan’s (1995) local risk-neutral valuation relationship (mLRNVR) for the GARCH option-pricing models. In our mLRNVR, the conditional variances under two measures are designed to be different and the variance process is more persistent in the risk-neutral measure than...

This paper investigates the variance risk premium in an international setting. First, I provide new evidence on the basic stylized facts traditionally documented for the US. I show that while the variance premiums in several countries are, on average, positive and display significant time...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the variance risk premium predicts aggregate stock market returns. We demonstrate that statistical finite sample biases cannot “explain” this apparent predictability. Further corroborating the existing evidence of the U.S., we show that country...

Both in the theoretical and applied literature of finance the difference in yield-to-maturity between corporate bonds and government bonds has been used as a measure of the risk of the former over the latter. While this approach has sometimes provided interesting results, the usefulness of yield...

I propose a simple framework that quantifies the stance of monetary policy as a 'shadow short rate' when the term structure is near the zero lower bound. I demonstrate my framework with a one-factor model applied to Japanese data, including an intuitive economic interpretation of the results,...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the variance risk premium predicts aggregate stock market returns. We demonstrate that statistical finite sample biases cannot “explain” this apparent predictability. Further corroborating the existing evidence of the U.S., we show that country...

The equity variance risk premium is the expected compensation earned for selling variance risk in equity markets. The variance risk premium is positive and shows moderate persistence. High variance risk premiums coincide with the left tail of the consumption growth distribution shifting down....

We show that the term structure of dividend risk premia and discount rates implied by equity strip yields are downward sloping in recessions and upward sloping in expansions, a finding which is statistically significant and robust across the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Our results are based on the...