In this study, we derive a CDS implied equity volatility index from highly liquid one-year contracts in the Eurozone, and for the inclusive period 2008-2014. We analyze the relationship between this volatility index and the VSTOXX 12M within a fractionally cointegrated vector autoregressive...

Recently, advantages of conformal deformations of the contours of integration in pricing formulas for European options have been demonstrated in the context of wide classes of L'evy models, the Heston model and other affine models. Similar deformations were used in one-factor L'evy models to...

We propose a method to extract the risk-neutral distribution of firm-specific stock returns using both options and credit default swaps (CDS). Options and CDS provide information about the central part and the left tail of the distribution, respectively. Together but not in isolation, options...

This paper presents a joint analysis of the term structure of credit default swap (CDS) spreads and the implied volatility surface for European countries during 2007-2012, a sample period covering both the Global Financial Crisis and the European debt crisis. We analyze to which extent...

Recently, the advantages of conformal deformations of the contours of integration in pricing formulas were demonstrated in the context of wide classes of Levy models and the Heston model. In the present paper we construct efficient conformal deformations of the contours of integration in the...

An increasing number of studies extract credit spreads using equity options data. This inference relies on the assumption that option and credit markets are integrated. I empirically test this assumption using firm level option implied credit spreads (IS) and CDS spreads. While the IS and CDS...

We provide evidence of a strong effect of the underlying stock's illiquidity on option prices by showing that the average absolute difference between historical and implied volatility increases with stock illiquidity. This pattern translates into significant excess returns of option trading...

A new method to retrieve the risk-neutral probability measure from observed option prices is developed and a closed form pricing formula for European options is obtained by employing a modified Gram-Charlier series expansion, known as the Gauss-Hermite expansion. This expansion converges for...

I document a sizeable bias that might arise when valuing out of the money American options via the Least Square Method proposed by Longstaff and Schwartz (2001). The key point of this algorithm is the regression-based estimate of the continuation value of an American option. If this regression...

This paper demonstrates that it is possible to improve significantly on the estimated call prices obtained with the regression and simulation-based least-squares Monte Carlo method by using put-call symmetry. The results show that, for a large sample of options with characteristics of relevance...