Empirical evidence from equity markets clearly shows that the volatility of asset returns varies randomly in time. Typically, this randomness is referred to as stochastic volatility. In this article, we review how stochastic volatility can be modeled, and the use of asymptotic analysis to quantify (i) how the presence of stochastic volatility affects option prices, and (ii) how stochastic volat...

While volatile marketing spending, as opposed to even-level spending, may improve a brand’s financial performance, it can also increase the volatility of performance, which is not a desirable outcome. This paper analyzes how revenue and cash-flow volatility are influenced by own and competitive marketing spending volatility, by the level of marketing spending, by the responsiveness to own marke...

We study the forecasting of future realized volatility in the foreign exchange, stock, and bond markets from variables in the information set, including implied volatility backed out from option prices. Realized volatility is separated into its continuous and jump components, and the heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) model is applied with implied volatility as an additional forecasting variabl...

In this paper, we assess the efficiency, information content and unbiasedness of volatility forecasts based on the VIX/VXN implied volatility indexes, RiskMetrics and GARCHtype models at the 5-, 10and 22-day time horizon. Our empirical application focuses on the S&P100 and NASDAQ100 indexes. We also deal with the information content of the competing volatility forecasts in a market risk (VaR ty...

INTRODUCTION 2011 was a period fraught with turbulence in financial markets. Managed Futures strategies, despite their common association with long volatility, did not fare as well as some might have expected amidst this turbulence. A closer look at volatility, what it means to be long or short volatility, and Managed Futures performance across different regimes in volatility can provide insigh...

In this chapter we use particle filtering methods to estimate volatility and examine volatility dynamics for three financial time series during the early part of the current credit crisis. We compare estimates from a pure stochastic volatility model, a stochastic volatility model with jumps and a Garch model to each other and to the market volatilities implied by actual option prices. Our three...

In this paper we document that realized variation measures constructed from highfrequency returns reveal a large degree of volatility risk in stock and index returns, where we characterize volatility risk by the extent to which forecasting errors in realized volatility are substantive. Even though returns standardized by ex post quadratic variation measures are nearly gaussian, this unpredictab...

The unbiasedness tests of implied volatility as a forecast of future realized volatility have found implied volatility to be a biased predictor. We explain this puzzle by recognizing that option prices contain a market risk premium not only on the asset itself, but also on its volatility. We show using a stochastic volatility model, that a call option price can be represented as an expected val...