People by and large tend to postpone their present consumption for numerous reasons. This postponement of consumption leaves them with surplus money to invest for future consumption. Amongst the number of alternatives avenues present for such investments, gold too tends to be one of them. People...

Statistical theory has been relatively absent in the exercise of estimating parameters of an option pricing model from cross-sectional data at a fixed point of calendar time. The cross-sectional data typically consists of prices for options at various strikes and maturities at market close. The...

We study a new class of three-factor affine option pricing models with interdependent volatilitydynamics and a stochastic skewness component unrelated to volatility shocks. Theseproperties are useful in order (i) to model a term structure of implied volatility skews moreconsistent with the data...

We elaborate economic explanations for the time-varying risk of month, quarter and year base load electricity forward contracts traded on the Nord Pool Energy Exchange from January 2006 to March 2010. Daily risk quantities are generated by decomposing realized volatility in its continuous and...

We study the real-time characteristics and drivers of jumps in option prices. To this end, we employ high frequency data from the 24-hour E-mini S&P 500 options market. We find that option prices do not jump simultaneously across strikes and maturities and are uncorrelated with jumps in the...

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...