This paper provides and empirical examination of four European equity indices between 1991 and 2005. We investigate the ability of fifteen different GARCH models to capture the characteristics of historical daily returns effectively and generate realistic implied volatility skews. Using many...

GARCH option pricing models have the advantage of a well-established econometric foundation. However, multiple states need to be introduced as single state GARCH and even Levy processes are unable to explain the term structure of the moments of financial data. We show that the continuous time...

Normal mixture (NM) GARCH models are better able to account for leptokurtosis in financial data and offer a more intuitive and tractable framework for risk analysis and option pricing than student’s t-GARCH models. We present a general, symmetric parameterisation for NM-GARCH(1,1) models,...

Contrary to popular belief, the diffusion limit of a GARCH variance process is not a diffusion model unless one makes a very specific assumption that cannot be generalized. In fact, the normal GARCH(1,1) prices of European call and puts are identical to the Black-Scholes prices based on the...

Some recent specifications for GARCH error processes explicitly assume a conditional variance that is generated by a mixture of normal components, albeit with some parameter restrictions. This paper analyses the general normal mixture GARCH(1,1) model which can capture time-variation in both...