We provide results for the valuation of European style contingent claims for a large class of specifications of the underlying asset returns. Our valuation results obtain in a discrete time, infinite state-space setup using the no-arbitrage principle and an equivalent martin-gale measure. Our...

This paper investigates the importance of market incompleteness by comparing the rate of risk aversion estimated from complete and incomplete markets environments. For the incomplete markets case, we use consumption data for 50 U.S. states. While the use of state level data is conceptually...

There is extensive empirical evidence that index option prices systematically differ from Black-Scholes prices. Out-of-the-money put prices (and in-the-money call prices) are relatively high compared to the Black-Scholes price. Motivated by these empirical facts, we develop a new discrete-time...

Which loss function should be used when estimating and evaluating option valuation models? Many different functions have been suggested, but no standard has emerged. We do not promote a particular function, but instead emphasize that consistency in the choice of loss functions is crucial. First,...

Characterizing asset return dynamics using GARCH models is an important part of empirical finance. The existing literature favors some rather complex volatility specifications whose relative performance is usually assessed through their likelihood based on a time-series of asset returns. This...

We build a new class of discrete time models where the distribution of daily returns is driven by two factors: dynamic volatility and dynamic jump intensity. Each factor has its own risk premium. The likelihood function for the models is available using analytical filtering, which makes them...

This paper presents a new model for the valuation of European options, in which the volatility of returns consists of two components. One of these components is a long-run component, and it can be modeled as fully persistent. The other component is short-run and has a zero mean. Our model can be...

Most recent empirical option valuation studies build on the affine square root (SQR) stochastic volatility model. The SQR model is a convenient choice, because it yields closed-form solutions for option prices. However, relatively little is known about the resulting biases. We investigate...

When the relationship between observed fixed-income securities and the latent state variables in dynamic term structure models is nonlinear, existing studies usually linearize this relationship because nonlinear filtering is computationally demanding. We propose the use of the unscented Kalman...

The existing literature finds that information not captured by traditional term structure factors helps predict excess bond returns. When estimating no-arbitrage affine term structure models, aligning in-sample and out-of-sample objective functions results in term structure factors that capture...