We decompose the variance risk premium into upside and downside variance risk premia. These components reflect market compensation for changes in good and bad uncertainties. Their difference is a measure of the skewness risk premium (SRP), which captures asymmetric views on favorable versus...

This study compares and contrasts the multiple characterizations of mean reversion in financial time series as regards the restrictions they imply. This is accomplished by translating them into statements about an alternative measure, the "Average Crossing Time" or ACT. We argue that the ACT...

In a framework of heterogeneous beliefs, I investigate a two-date consumption model with continuous trading over the interval [0; T], in which information on the aggregate consumption at time T is revealed by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Bridge. This information structure allows investors to speculate...

Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) have developed two measures of pricing errors for asset-pricing models: the maximum pricing error in all static portfolios of the test assets and the maximum pricing error in all contingent claims of the assets. In this paper, we develop simulation-based Bayesian...

Using the prices of crude oil futures contracts, we construct the term structure of crude oil convenience yields out to one-year maturity. The crude oil convenience yield can be interpreted as the interest rate, denominated in barrels of oil, for borrowing a single barrel of oil, and it measures...

The cross-sectional relationship between expected returns and amortized spreads is studied in an overlapping-generations economy with an average investor. The commonality in liquidity is directly incorporated into the asset-pricing relation. In a static equilibrium, the amortized spread of an...

The dangers of shouting ``fire'' in a crowded theater are well understood, but the dangers of rushing to the exit in the financial markets are more complex. Yet, the two events share several features, and I analyze why people crowd into theaters and trades, why they run, what determines the...

This paper studies portfolio optimization through improvements of ex-ante conditional covariance estimates. We use the cross-section of stock returns over a 52-year sample to analyze trading performance by implementing the machine learning algorithm of hierarchical clustering. We find that...

We develop a discrete-time affine stochastic volatility model with time-varying conditional skewness (SVS). Importantly, we disentangle the dynamics of conditional volatility and conditional skewness in a coherent way. Our approach allows current asset returns to be asymmetric conditional on...

A number of recent theoretical studies have explored trading in fragmented markets, e.g. Biais et al. (2000), a phenomenon increasingly witnessed in modern markets. The key assumption generating the results is that there is at least one liquidity demander exploiting access to all markets by...