The volatility smile changed drastically around the crash of 1987, and new option pricing models have been proposed to accommodate that change. Deterministic volatility models allow for more flexible volatility surfaces but refrain from introducing additional risk factors. Thus, options are still redundant securities. Alternatively, stochastic models introduce additional risk factors, and options are then needed for spanning of the pricing kernel. We develop a statistical test based on this difference in spanning. Using daily S&P 500 index options data from 1986-1995, our tests suggest that both in- and out-of-the-money options are needed for spanning. The findings are inconsistent with deterministic volatility models but are consistent with stochastic models that incorporate additional priced risk factors, such as stochastic volatility, interest rates, or jumps.

We use the relative pricing of pairs of emerging market (EM) sovereign bonds issued in both dollars and euros to study capital markets frictions during periods of financial distress. During the 2007–2008 crisis, we find the emergence of large pricing anomalies in EM sovereign bond markets. Neither liquidity nor short-selling constraints can explain these persistent events. We use both cross-sectional and time-series information on these pricing anomalies to learn about specific geographical frictions in funding markets. We find support for explanations based on the interaction of banking capital-structure frictions and the fragility of wholesale funding markets. We document the effects of nonconventional policy interventions on this mispricing.

We study the properties of the nominal and real risk premia of the term structure of interest rates. We develop and solve the bond pricing implications of a structural monetary version of a real business cycle model, with taxes and endogenous monetary policy. We show the relation of this model with the class of essentially affine models that incorporate an endogenous state-dependent market price of risk. We characterize and estimate the inflation risk premium and find that over the last 40 years the ten-year inflation risk premium has been has averaged 70 basis points. It is time-varying, ranging from 20 to 140 basis points over the business cycle and its term structure is sharply upward sloping. The inflation risk premium explains 23% (42%) of the time variation in the five (ten)-year forward risk premium and it plays an important role in help explain deviations from the expectations hypothesis of interest rates.

Repo contracts, the most important form of collateralized lending, are widely used by financial institutions and hedge funds to create short-selling positions and manage their leverage profile. Moreover, they have become the primary tool of money management and monetary control of several central banks, including the Bundesbank and the newly born European Central Bank. This paper is an empirical study of this market. More specifically, we study the extent to which the current term structure of long term “special” repo spreads discount the future collateral value (specialness) of Treasuries. We ask whether repo spreads embed a liquidity risk premium and whether such a risk premium is time-varying. We quantify the size of the average liquidity risk premium and we provide empirical evidence of the extent of its time-variation.

A widespread approach in the implementation of asset pricing models is based on the periodic recalibration of its parameters and initial conditions to eliminate any conflict between model-implied and market prices. Modern no-arbitrage market models facilitate this procedure since their solution can usually be written in terms of the entire initial yield curve. As a result, the model fits (by construction) the interest rate term structure. This procedure is, however, generally time inconsistent since the model at time t=0 completely specifies the set of possible term structures for any t extgreater0. In this paper, we analyze the pros and cons of this widespread approach in pricing and hedging, both theoretically and empirically. The theoretical section of the paper shows (a) under which conditions recalibration improves the hedging errors by limiting the propagation of an initial error, (b) that recalibration introduces time-inconsistent errors that violate the self-financing argument of the standard replication strategy. The empirical section of the paper quantifies the trade-off between (a) and (b) under several scenarios. First, we compare this trade-off for two economies with and without model specification error. Then, we discuss the trade-off when the underlying economy is not Markovian.

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a new class of nonaffine models of the term structure of interest rates that is supported by an economy with habit formation. Distinguishing features of the model are that the interest rate dynamics are nonlinear, interest rates depend on lagged monetary and consumption shocks, and the price of risk is not a constant multiple of interest rate volatility. We find that habit persistence can help reproduce the nonlinearity of the spot rate process, the documented deviations from the expectations hypothesis, the persistence of the conditional volatility of interest rates, and the lead‐lag relationship between interest rates and monetary aggregates.

ABSTRACT This paper provides option pricing and volume implications for an economy with heterogeneous agents who face model uncertainty and have different beliefs on expected returns. Market incompleteness makes options nonredundant, while heterogeneity creates a link between differences in beliefs and option volumes. We solve for both option prices and volumes and test the joint empirical implications using S&P500 index option data. Specifically, we use survey data to build an Index of Dispersion in Beliefs and find that a model that takes information heterogeneity into account can explain the dynamics of option volume and the smile better than can reduced‐form models with stochastic volatility.

This paper studies the importance of heterogeneous beliefs for the dynamics of asset prices. We focus on currency markets, where the absence of short-selling constraints allows us to perform sharper tests of theoretical predictions. Using a unique data set with detailed information on foreign-exchange forecasts, we construct an empirical proxy for differences in beliefs. We show that this proxy has a strong effect on the implied volatility of currency options beyond the volatility of macroeconomic fundamentals. We document that differences in beliefs impact also on the shape of the implied volatility smile, on the volatility risk-premiums, and on future currency returns.

We use the relative pricing of pairs of emerging market (EM) sovereign bonds issued in both dollars and euros to study capital markets frictions during periods of financial distress. During the 2007–2008 crisis, we find the emergence of large pricing anomalies in EM sovereign bond markets. Neither liquidity nor short-selling constraints can explain these persistent events. We use both cross-sectional and time-series information on these pricing anomalies to learn about specific geographical frictions in funding markets. We find support for explanations based on the interaction of banking capital-structure frictions and the fragility of wholesale funding markets. We document the effects of nonconventional policy interventions on this mispricing.

The volatility smile changed drastically around the crash of 1987, and newoption pricing models have been proposed to accommodate that change. Deterministic volatility models allowfor more flexible volatility surfaces but refrain from introducing additional risk factors. Thus, options are still redundant securities. Alternatively, stochastic models introduce additional risk factors, and options are then needed for spanning of the pricing kernel. We develop a statistical test based on this difference in spanning. Using daily S&P 500 index options data from 1986–1995, our tests suggest that both in- and out-of-the-money options are needed for spanning. The findings are inconsistent with deterministic volatility models but are consistent with stochastic models that incorporate additional priced risk factors, such as stochastic volatility, interest rates, or jumps.