Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

This paper computes parametric estimates of a time-varying risk premium model and compares the one-step-ahead forecasts implied by that model with those given by a nonparametric kernel estimator of the conditional mean function. The conditioning information used for the nonparametric analysis is...