Does the presence of arbitrageurs decrease equilibrium asset price volatility? I study an economy with arbitrageurs, informed investors, and noise traders. Arbitrageurs face a trade-off between arbitrage and inference: they would like to buy assets in response to temporary price declines (the...

We explore the cross-sectional pricing of volatility risk by decomposing equity market volatility into short- and long-run components. Our finding that prices of risk are negative and significant for both volatility components implies that investors pay for insurance against increases in...

We present estimates of the term structure of inflation expectations, derived from an affine model of real and nominal yield curves. The model features stochastic covariation of inflation with the real pricing kernel, enabling us to extract a time-varying inflation risk premium. We fit the model...

The identification of the forces that drive stock returns and the dynamics of their associated volatilities is a major concern in empirical economics and finance. This analysis is particularly relevant for determining optimal hedging strategies based on whether shocks to the volatilities of...

This paper investigates the forecasting performance of three popular variants of the non-linear GARCH models, namely VS-GARCH, GJR-GARCH and Q-GARCH, with the symmetric GARCH(1,1) model as a benchmark. The application involves ten European stock price indexes. Forecasts produced by each...

The recent introduction of the realized variance measure defined as the sum of the squared intra-daily returns stamped on some high frequency basis has spurred the research in the field of volatility modeling and forecasting into new directions. First, the realized variance is a much better...

Contributions by investor-owned companies play major roles in financing the campaigns of candidates for elective office in the United States. We look at the presidential level and analyze contributions by companies before an election and their stock market performance following US presidential...

Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

An asymmetric multivariate generalization of the recently proposed class of normal mixture GARCH models is developed. Issues of parametrization and estimation are discussed. Conditions for covariance stationarity and the existence of the fourth moment are derived, and expressions for the dynamic...

We develop a multivariate generalization of the Markov-switching GARCH model introduced by Haas, Mittnik, and Paolella (2004b) and derive its fourth-moment structure. An application to international stock markets illustrates the relevance of accounting for volatility regimes from both a...