Motivated by the theory of demand-based option pricing in imperfect markets, we examine the relation between short-sale constraints and equity option returns, conditional on the level of mis-pricing in the underlying stock. We report a monotonic relation between various measures of short-sales...

The 1987 market crash was associated with a dramatic and permanent steepening of the implied volatility curve for equity index options, despite minimal changes in aggregate consumption. We explain these events within a general equilibrium framework in which expected endowment growth and economic...

Researchers who estimate affine term structure models often impose overidentifying restrictions (restrictions on parameters beyond those necessary for identification) for a variety of reasons. While some of those restrictions seem to have minor effects on the extracted factors and some measures...

We develop a comprehensive mathematical framework for polynomial jump-diffusions in a semimartingale context, which nest affine jump-diffusions and have broad applications in finance. We show that the polynomial property is preserved under polynomial transformations and Lévy time change. We...

While empirical literature has documented a negative relation between default risk and stock returns, the theory suggests that default risk should be positively priced. We provide an explanation for this "default anomaly", by calculating monthly probabilities of default (PDs) for a large sample...

It is shown how to construct an arbitrage-free short rate model under uncertainty about the drift and the volatility. The uncertainty is represented by a set of priors, which naturally leads to a G-Brownian motion. Within this framework, it is shown how to characterize the whole term structure...

Market efficiency and the pricing kernel are closely related. A non-monotonic decreasing pricing kernel implies the existence of a trading strategy in contingent claims that stochastically dominates a direct investment in the market. Moreover, a market is assumed to be efficient only if no...

We introduce Implied Volatility Duration (IVD) as a new measure for the timing of uncertainty resolution, with a high IVD corresponding to late resolution. Portfolio sorts on a large cross-section of stocks indicate that investors demand on average more than five percent return per year as a...

This paper provides a novel methodology for estimating option pricing models based on risk-neutral moments. We synthesize the distribution extracted from a panel of option prices and exploit linear relationships between risk-neutral cumulants and latent factors within the continuous time affine...

Advances in variance analysis permit the splitting of the total quadratic variation of a jump diffusion process into upside and downside components. Recent studies establish that this decomposition enhances volatility predictions, and highlight the upside/downside variance spread as a driver of...