We investigate whether alternative asset classes should be included in optimal portfolios of the most prominent investor personae in the Behavioral Finance literature, namely, the Cumulative Prospect Theory, the Markowitz and the Loss Averse types of investors. We develop a stochastic spanning...

This paper investigates model dynamics and risk premia in the short term market for crude oil futures. Stochastic volatility models, with and without jumps, are estimated using data on both futures and option prices. As an economic application we apply the estimated models to the pricing of...

We study whether prices of traded options contain information about future extreme market events. Our option-implied conditional expectation of market loss due to tail events, or tail loss measure, predicts future market returns, magnitude, and probability of the market crashes, beyond and above...

We study minute-by-minute behavior of the VIX index and trading activity in the underlying S&P 500 options to understand the impact of macro and microeconomic forces on risk neutral volatility. VIX often increases with macroeconomic news, reflects the credibility of Fed monetary stimulus, and...

We identify a global risk factor in the cross-section of implied volatility returns in currency markets. A zero-cost strategy that buys forward volatility agreements with downward sloping implied volatility curves and sells those with upward slopes - volatility carry strategy - generates...

The shape of the VIX term structure conveys information about the price of variance risk rather than expected changes in the VIX, a rejection of the expectations hypothesis. A single principal component, Slope, summarizes nearly all this information, predicting the excess returns of S&P 500...

We extract variance and skew risk premiums from volatility derivatives in a model-free way and analyze their relationships along with volatility index and equity index returns. These risk premiums can be synthesized through option trading strategies. Using a time series of option prices on the...