Volatility swaps and volatility options are financial products written on discretely sampled realized variance. Actively traded in over-the-counter markets, these products are often priced by continuously sampled approximations to simplify the computations. This paper presents an analytical...

We suggest a joint analysis of ex-post intra-day variability in an option and its associated underlying asset market as a novel means of validating an option pricing model. For this purpose, we introduce the notion of option realized variance, by which we mean the cumulative variance realized by...

In September 2002, a new market in Economic Derivatives was launched allowing traders to take positions on future values of several macroeconomic data releases. We provide an initial analysis of the prices of these options. We find that market-based measures of expectations are similar to...

INTRODUCTION;ROLE OF FINANCIAL VARIABLES;A TWO-STEP APPROACH TO MODEL INFLATION ; MODELLING LONG-MEDIUM TERM COMPONENT OF INFLATION ;A MIXED-FREQUENCY MODEL FOR REAL-TIME FORECASTS OF INFLATION; 4 TWO FORECASTING APPLICATIONS IN REAL-TIME; REAL-TIME FORECASTS OF MONTHLY INFLATION; MODEL FORECASTS...

Prediction markets – markets used to forecast future events – have been used to accurately forecast the outcome of political contests, sporting events, and, occasionally, economic outcomes. This chapter summarizes the latest research on prediction markets in order to further their...

We compare the accuracy of the survey forecasts and forecasts implied by economic binary options on the U.S. nonfarm payroll change. These options are available for a number of ranges of the announced figure, and each pays $1 if the released nonfarm payroll change falls in the given range. For...