Fixed income Asian options are frequently adopted by companies to hedge interest rate risk. Having a payoff structure depending on the cumulative short-term rate makes them particularly informativeabout interest rate volatility risk. Based on a joint dataset of bonds and Asian interest rate...

Option prices, particularly those of out-of-the-money equity index puts, are difficult to justify in a no-arbitrage framework. This paper shows how limits to arbitrage affect the relative pricing of out-of-the-money put vs. call options (option-implied skewness). Decomposing the price of...

This paper shows that the VIX market contains information on the variance of the S&P 500 returns, which is not already spanned by the S&P 500 market. We estimate a flexible affine model based on a joint time series of underlying indexes and option prices on both markets. We find that including...

Equity index risk premia vary more than can be explained by market risks and pricing models. I show that index option intermediaries cause variation in risk premia to manage their option positions. When expected volatility is low, intermediaries hold risky short positions. Increasing risk and...

In this paper, we present a novel method to extract the risk-neutral probability of default from American put option prices. Under the assumptions of Carr and Wu (2011), we derive a closed form expression for American put options from which the probability of default can be inferred. Our...

We show that the dividend growth rate implied by the options market is informative about (i) the expected dividend growth rate and (ii) the expected dividend risk premium. We model the expected dividend risk premium and explore its implications for the predictability of dividend growth and stock...

We use learning in an equilibrium model to explain the puzzling predictive power of the volatility risk premium (VRP) for option returns. In the model, a representative agent follows a rational Bayesian learning process in an economy under incomplete information with the objective of pricing...

We embed systematic default, pro-cyclical recovery rates and habit persistence into a model with a slight possibility of a macroeconomic disaster of reasonable magnitude. We derive analytical solutions for defaultable bond prices and show that a single set of structural parameters calibrated to...

Risk premia are related to price probability ratios or for continuous time pure jump processes the ratios of jump arrival rates under the pricing and physical measures. The variance gamma model is employed to synthesize densities with risk premia seen as the ratio of the three parameters. The...