We study in details the skew of stock option smiles, which is induced by the so-called leverage effect on the underlying -- i.e. the correlation between past returns and future square returns. This naturally explains the anomalous dependence of the skew as a function of maturity of the option....

Financial markets display a host of universal “stylized facts” begging for a scientific explanation: Excess volatility, fat tails, and clustered activity are well known and have been studied for many years. More microstructural stylized facts have recently emerged, for example the long...