Many asset pricing theories treat the cross-section of returns volatility and correlations as two intimately related quantities driven by common factors, which hinders achieving a neat definition of a correlation premium. We formulate a model without factors, but with a continuum of securities...

VIX futures prices rose slowly in late February and early March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Futures price premiums, defined as futures prices minus real-time statistical forecasts of future VIX values, turned sharply negative and remained negative until mid-April. Trading strategies...

We document a strong positive cross-sectional relation between corporate bond yield spreads and bond return volatilities. As corporate bond prices are generally attributable to both credit risk and illiquidity as discussed in Huang and Huang (2012), we apply a decomposition methodology to...

A recent successful literature derives non-parametric time-varying lower bounds on the risk premia of asset returns in real time. The implicit restriction is that equilibrium risk premia of assets positively correlated with the market must be strictly positive. Such strong requirement is not...

Relying on options written on the USO, an exchange traded fund tracking the daily price changes of the WTI light sweet crude oil, we extract variance and skew risk premiums in a model-free way. We further decompose these risk premiums into downside and upside conditional components and show that...

We study a new constrained equity premium forecasting approach which employs the option-implied lower bounds for the conditional market premium from Martin (2017) and Chabi-Yo and Loudis (2020), respectively, as forecast constraints. This constrained approach delivers considerable out-of-sample...

This paper aims to explore whether the cause of return premium associated with the Amihud (2002) illiquidity measure is the compensation for illiquidity or mispricing. This paper defines the Amihud premium as the difference in expected returns between high-Amihud-portfolio and...

The stylized fact that volatility is not priced in individual equity options does not withstand scrutiny. We show, first, that the average return of heavily traded deep out-of-the-money call options on stocks is -116 basis points per day. Second, Fama- MacBeth estimates of the volatility risk...

In a one-period economy, Martin (2017) and Chabi-Yo and Loudis (2020) derive bounds for the equity risk premium that use options of the same maturity as the horizon at which the premium is measured. In contrast, we provide an expression and an empirical methodology to measure the premium at a...

This paper develops a new approach to explain why risk factors constructed from option returns are priced in the stock market. We decompose an option- based factor into three main components and identify the one responsible for the beta-return relationship. Applying this method to the bear risk...