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...

This article analyzes the role of liquidity in the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) market. We employ a continuous-time specification to incorporate illiquidity as an additional pricing factor of default swap contracts for the most developed economies. The illiquidity discount process is...

This article aims to extend evaluation of the classic multifactor model of Carhart (1997) for the case of global equity indices and to expand analysis performed in Sakowski et. al. (2015). Our intention is to test several modifications of these models to take into account different dynamics of...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of trading in the sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) market, using weekly data for single-name sovereign CDS from October 2008 to September 2015. We describe the anatomy of the sovereign CDS market, derive a law of motion for gross...

This paper studies the information content of the S&P 500 and VIX markets on the volatility of the S&P 500 returns. We estimate a flexible affine model based on a joint time series of underlying indexes and option prices on both markets. An extensive model specification analysis reveals that...

This paper decomposes the risk premia of individual stocks into contributions from systematic and idiosyncratic risks. I introduce an affine jump-diffusion model, which accounts for both the factor structure of asset returns and that of the variance of idiosyncratic returns. The estimation is...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

Supported by empirical examples, this paper provides a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set for the estimation of the empirical pricing kernel and, more in general, for the validity of the fundamental theorems of asset pricing. While inferring the...

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...