This paper focuses on the effects of political uncertainty and the political process on implied stock market volatility during U.S. presidential election cycles. Using monthly Iowa Electronic Markets data over five elections, we document that stock market uncertainty, as measured by the VIX...

We study the intra-day impact of algorithmic trading on the futures market to increase our understanding of algorithmic trading and its role in the price formation process. First, we find that algorithmic trading provides liquidity when the spread is wide and that algorithms enter the market at...

This article describes the primary uses of the VIX index in the financial literature, offering for the first time a joint view of its successes and failures in key financial areas. VIX is a model-free volatility index that measures the investor "fear" gauge due to its significant and negative...

Prior research documents that volatility spreads predict stock returns. If the trading activity of informed investors is an important driver of volatility spreads, then the predictability of stock returns should be more pronounced during major information events. This paper investigates whether...

We show that log-dividends (d) and log-prices (p) are cointegrated, but, instead of de facto assuming the stationarity of the classical log dividend–price ratio, we allow the data to reveal the cointegration vector between d and p. We define the modified dividend–price ratio (mdp), as the...

We forecast monthly Value at Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) using option market data and four different econometric techniques. Independently from the econometric approach used, all models produce quick to estimate forward-looking risk measures that do not depend from the amount...

Geopolitical events are widely reported in the press and may influence the risk premium demanded by investors in addition to demand and supply of energy resources. Using the daily geopolitical risk index of Caldara and Iacoviello (2018), we demonstrate that geopolitical risk plays an important...

We evaluate price discovery in the natural gas futures and futures options markets using a transaction based approach. By sampling market maker prices, we allow for a distinction between buy and sell prices, both directly from the futures market, and implied from the options market. Information...

In this paper, I show that the volatility index VIX is not model-free as soon as the diff usion term is not Brownian motion even when correcting for jumps. In a stock index model that allows for temporary periods of under- or overreaction, such as a multifractional model, a wrong annualization...

Which market has leading informational advantage: stocks or options? Using large set of stock and option characteristics, and machine learning, we provide a comprehensive analysis of which characteristics are the first order importance predictors of options and stock returns. First, we find that...