We study the term structure of variance (total risk), systematic and idiosyncratic risk. Consistent with the expectations hypothesis, we find that, for the entire market, the slope of the term structure of variance is mainly informative about the path of future variance. Thus, there is little...

We comprehensively analyze the predictive power of several option implied variables for monthly S & P 500 excess returns and realized variance. The correlation risk premium (CRP) emerges as a strong predictor of both excess returns and realized variance. This is true both in- and out-of-sample....

We exploit weekly options on the S&P 500 index to compute the weekly implied variance. We show that the weekly implied variance is a strong predictor of the weekly realized variance. In an encompassing regression test, it crowds out the information content of the monthly implied variance....