This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the properties of popular tests for the existence and the sign of the market price of volatility risk. These tests are frequently based on the fact that for some option pricing models under continuous hedging the sign of the market price of volatility...

This paper provides a theoretical and numerical analysis of robust hedging strategies in a diffusion-type setup including stochastic volatility models. A hedging strategy is called robust if the hedger achieves an overprotection whenever the realised volatility stays within a given interval. We...

We analyze the optimal insurance demand in a dynamic setup with two periods. In addition to the possibility to insure, the investor is allowed to transfer wealth between the two periods, i.e. she can save. While it is difficult to interpret the optimal saving and insurance decisions without...

Money illusion refers to the tendency to evaluate economic transactions in nominal rather than real terms. One manifestation of this phenomenon is the tendency to neglect future inflation in intertemporal investment decisions. Empirical evidence for this “inflation ignorance” is hard to...

We show that the widely documented negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) and expected returns can be explained by the mean reversion of stocks' idiosyncratic volatilities. We use option-implied information to extract the mean reversion speed of IVOL in an almost model-free...

Many optimization-based portfolio rules fail to beat the simple 1/N rule out-of-sample because of parameter uncertainty. In this paper we suggest a grouping strategy in which we first form groups of equally weighted stocks and then optimize over the resulting groups only. This strategy aims at...

Directed links in cash flow networks affect the cross-section of price exposures and market prices of risk in equilibrium. In an asset pricing model featuring mutually exciting jumps, we measure directedness through an asset's shock propagation capacity (spc). In the model, we prove: (i) Cash...

We study the optimal portfolio choice of international investors when variances and correlations are stochastic. We assume that the returns from the perspective of the domestic investor are driven by a Wishart Affine Stochastic Correlation (WASC) model. We show that this also holds from the...

We use the informational content of VIX derivatives to infer implications on the non-affine modeling of the stock returns' variance dynamics. We find that both a non-affine diffusion and variance jumps are necessary to capture the short- and long-term implied volatility distribution. In- and...

We analyze the optimal portfolio choice in a multi-asset Wishart-model in which return variances and correlations are stochastic and subject to jump risk. The optimal portfolio is characterized by the positions in stock diffusion risk, variance-covariance diffusion risk, and jump risk. We find...