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...

Many consumption-based models succeed in matching long lists of asset price moments. We propose an alternative, full-information Bayesian evaluation that decomposes the price-dividend ratio (p/d) into contributions from long-run risks, habit, and a residual. We find that long-run risks account...

This paper develops a method to select the threshold in threshold-based jump detection methods. The method is motivated by an analysis of threshold-based jump detection methods in the context of jump-diffusion models. We show that over the range of sampling frequencies a researcher is most...

This paper is the first to characterize the intraday performance of leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs), for which I introduce a superior volatility estimator for high-frequency analysis. Leveraged ETFs, which attempt to reproduce two or three times the daily performance of their underlying...

The prices of derivatives contracts can be used to estimate ‘risk-neutral' probability density functions that give an indication of the weight investors place on different future prices of their underlying assets, were they risk-neutral. In the likely case that investors are risk-averse, this...