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...

Forward foreign exchange contracts embed not only expected depreciation but also a sizable premium, which complicates inferences about anticipated returns. This study derives arbitrage-free affine forward currency models (AFCMs) with closed-form expressions for both unobservable variables. Model...

Spreads of agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) vary significantly in the cross section and over time, but the sources of this variation are not well understood. We document that, in the cross section, MBS spreads adjusted for the prepayment option show a pronounced smile with respect to the...

Purportedly consistent with "risk parity" (RP) asset allocation, recent studies document compelling "low risk" trading strategies that exploit a persistently negative relation between Sharpe ratios (SRs) and maturity along the U.S. Treasury (UST) term structure. This paper extends this evidence...

A vast literature reports excess returns to momentum strategies across many financial asset classes. However, no study examines trading rules based on price history along individual government-bond term structures - that is, with respect to duration buckets across the curve - as opposed to...

Reduced-form models of default that attribute a large fraction of credit spreads to compensation for credit event risk typically preclude the most plausible economic justification for such risk to be priced - namely, a contagious response of the market portfolio during the credit event. When...

We investigate intermediary asset pricing theories empirically and find strong support for models that have intermediary leverage as the relevant state variable. A parsimonious model that uses detrended dealer leverage as a price-of-risk variable, and innovations to dealer leverage as a pricing...