We quantify the effect of financial leverage on stock return volatility in a dynamic general equilibrium economy with debt and equity claims. We study the effects of financial leverage on the market portfolio, and on a small firm with idiosyncratic and market risk. In an economy with both a...

We provide a new framework for estimating the systematic and idiosyncratic jump tail risks in financial asset prices. The theory underlying our estimates are based on in-fill asymptotic arguments for directly identifying the systematic and idiosyncratic jumps, together with conventional...

Principal component analysis of equity options on Dow-Jones firms reveals a strong factor structure. The first principal component explains 77% of the variation in the equity volatility level, 77% of the variation in the equity option skew, and 60% of the implied volatility term structure across...

Under proportional transaction costs, a price process is said to have a consistent price system, if there is a semimartingale with an equivalent martingale measure that evolves within the bid-ask spread. We show that a continuous, multi-asset price process has a consistent price system, under...

The variance risk premium, defined as the difference between actual and risk-neutralized expectations of the forward aggregate market variation, helps predict future market returns. Relying on new essentially model-free estimation procedure, we show that much of this predictability may be...

Financial economists have long been interested in the empirical relation between the conditional mean and conditional volatility of excess stock market returns, often referred to as the risk-return relation. Unfortunately, the body of empirical evidence on the risk-return relation is mixed and...

We provide a new theoretical framework for disentangling and estimating sensitivity towards systematic diffusive and jump risks in the context of factor pricing models. Our estimates of the sensitivities towards systematic risks, or betas, are based on the notion of increasingly finer sampled...

We propose a new and flexible non-parametric framework for estimating the jump tails of Itô semimartingale processes. The approach is based on a relatively simple-to-implement set of estimating equations associated with the compensator for the jump measure, or its "intensity", that only...

We scrutinize the monthly realized stock-bond correlation based upon high frequency returns. In particular, we use a probit model to track the dynamics of the sign of the correlation relative to its various economic forces. The sign is predictable to a large extent with bond market liquidity...

Recent research has focused on modelling asset prices by Itô semimartingales. In such a modelling framework, the quadratic variation consists of a continuous and a jump component. This paper is about inference on the jump part of the quadratic variation, which can be estimated by the difference...