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Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis Vol. 52 No. 6 2017

Risk Premia and the VIX Term Structure

Travis L. Johnson

Abstract

The shape of the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index (VIX) term structure conveys information about the price of variance risk rather than expected changes in the VIX, a rejection of the expectations hypothesis. The second principal component, SLOPE, summarizes nearly all this information, predicting the excess returns of synthetic Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 variance swaps, VIX futures, and S&P 500 straddles for all maturities and to the exclusion of the rest of the term structure. SLOPE’s predictability is incremental to other proxies for the conditional variance risk premia, economically significant, and inconsistent with standard asset pricing models.

DOI
10.1017/s0022109017000825
Volume
52
Issue
6
Pages
2461-2490
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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