This paper investigates price jumps in commodity markets. We find that jumps are rare and extreme events but occur less frequently than in stock markets. Nonetheless, jump correlations across commodities can be high depending on the commodity sectors. Energy, metal and grains commodities show...

Does the selection of a specific interest rate model to use for pricing, hedging, and risk-return analysis depend upon whether the user is a buy-side institution or a sell-side dealer bank? Sanjay Nawalkha and Riccardo Rebonato debate this question in this paper and provide some insightful...

We investigate the effect of including variance derivatives as calibration and hedging instruments for pricing and hedging exotic structures. This is studied empirically using market data for SPX and VIX derivatives applied in a stochastic volatility jump diffusion model

We contrast two different asset pricing models, where the pricing kernel either (i) increases in the volatility dimension, reflecting investors' aversion to volatility, or (ii) could be non-monotonic in volatility, reflecting heterogeneity in investors' beliefs. The two models yield opposite...

This paper presents an option positioning that allows us to infer forward variances from option portfolios. The forward variances we construct from equity index options help to predict (i) growth in measures of real economic activity, (ii) Treasury bill returns, (iii) stock market returns, and...

Recently, commodity index investing has come under attack. A Staff Report by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation (hereafter, the "subcommittee report") "…finds that there is significant and persuasive evidence to conclude that these commodity index traders, in the...

We address the empirical implementation of the static asset allocation problem by developing a forward looking approach that uses information from market option prices. To this end, we extract constant maturity S&P 500 implied distributions and transform them to the corresponding risk-adjusted...

We investigate whether the spread of corporate debt contacts can be explained by their ultimate recovery rates. Using the actual realized recovery rates of defaulted debt instruments issued in the U.S. from 1962 to 2007, we find that recovery rate is reflected in the spread at issuance, and that...

We propose a model of volatility tail behavior, in which the pricing measure dominates the physical measure in both tails of the volatility distribution and, hence, the derived pricing kernel exhibits an increasing and decreasing region in the volatility dimension. The model features investors...

We examine the pricing of volatility risk in the cross-section of equity Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) stock returns over the 1996 – 2010 period. We consider both aggregate (systematic) volatility and firm-specific (idiosyncratic) volatility. In contrast to the negative and significant...