This paper presents an innovative approach to extracting factors which are shown to predict the VIX, the S&P 500 Realized Volatility and the Variance Risk Premium. The approach is innovative along two different dimensions, namely: (1) we extract factors from panels of filtered volatilities - in...

Factor analysis is a widely used tool to summarize high dimensional panel data via a small dimensional set of latent factors. Applications, particularly in finance, are often focused on observable factors with an economic interpretation. The objective of this paper is to provide a formal test...

Hint: these are not the Fama-French 3 factors and they are not even spanned by the Fama-French 5 factors. More importantly, they feature superior out-of-sample pricing performance compared to standard asset pricing models. What is “common” about these factors? We identify the factor space...