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Working Paper
Dynamic estimation of volatility risk premia and investor risk aversion from option-implied and realized volatilities
This paper proposes a method for constructing a volatility risk premium, or investor risk aversion, index. The method is intuitive and simple to implement, relying on the sample moments of the recently popularized model-free realized and option-implied volatility measures. A small-scale Monte Carlo experiment suggests that the procedure works well in practice. Implementing the procedure with actual S&P 500 option-implied volatilities and high-frequency five-minute-based realized volatilities results in significant temporal dependencies in the estimated stochastic volatility risk premium, ...
Working Paper
The systemic risk of European banks during the financial and sovereign debt crises
We propose a hypothetical distress insurance premium (DIP) as a measure of the European banking systemic risk, which integrates the characteristics of bank size, default probability, and interconnectedness. Based on this measure, the systemic risk of European banks reached its height in late 2011 around ? 500 billion. We find that the sovereign default spread is the factor driving this heightened risk in the banking sector during the European debt crisis. The methodology can also be used to identify the individual contributions of over 50 major European banks to the systemic risk measure. ...
Working Paper
Expected stock returns and variance risk premia
We find that the difference between implied and realized variances, or the variance risk premium, is able to explain more than fifteen percent of the ex-post time series variation in quarterly excess returns on the market portfolio over the 1990 to 2005 sample period, with high (low) premia predicting high (low) future returns. The magnitude of the return predictability of the variance risk premium easily dominates that afforded by standard predictor variables like the P/E ratio, the dividend yield, the default spread, and the consumption-wealth ratio (CAY). Moreover, combining the variance ...
Working Paper
Systemic risk contributions
We adopt a systemic risk indicator measured by the price of insurance against systemic financial distress and assess individual banks' marginal contributions to the systemic risk. The methodology is applied using publicly available data to the 19 bank holding companies covered by the U.S. Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP), with the systemic risk indicator peaking around $1.1 trillion in March 2009. Our systemic risk contribution measure shows interesting similarity to and divergence from the SCAP expected loss measure. In general, we find that a bank's contribution to the systemic ...
Working Paper
Hot money and quantitative easing: the spillover effect of U.S. monetary policy on Chinese housing, equity and loan markets
We study a factor-augmented vector autoregression model to estimate the effects of changes in U.S. monetary policy, as well as changes in U.S. policy uncertainty, on the Chinese economy. We find that since the Great Recession, a decline in the U.S. policy rate would result in a significant increase in Chinese regulated interest rates, and rise in Chinese housing investment. One possible reason for this is the substantial inflow of hot money into China. Responses of Chinese variables to U.S. shocks at the zero lower bound are different from that in normal times, which suggest structural ...
Working Paper
Estimating stochastic volatility diffusion using conditional moments of integrated volatility
We exploit the distributional information contained in high-frequency intraday data in constructing a simple conditional moment estimator for stochastic volatility diffusions. The estimator is based on the analytical solutions of the first two conditional moments for the latent integrated volatility, the realization of which is effectively approximated by the sum of the squared high-frequency increments of the process. Our simulation evidence indicates that the resulting GMM estimator is highly reliable and accurate. Our empirical implementation based on high-frequency five-minute foreign ...
Working Paper
Itô conditional moment generator and the estimation of short rate processes
This paper exploits the It's formula to derive the conditional moments vector for the class of interest rate models that allow for nonlinear volatility and flexible jump specifications. Such a characterization of continuous-time processes by the Ito Conditional Moment Generator noticeably enlarges the admissible set beyond the affine jump-diffusion class. A simple GMM estimator can be constructed based on the analytical solution to the lower order moments, with natural diagnostics of the conditional mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis. Monte Carlo evidence suggests that the proposed ...
Working Paper
Credit default swap spreads and variance risk premia
We find that firm-level variance risk premium, estimated as the difference between option-implied and expected variances, has a prominent explanatory power for credit spreads in the presence of market- and firm-level risk control variables identified in the existing literature. Such a predictability complements that of the leading state variable--leverage ratio--and strengthens significantly with lower firm credit rating, longer credit contract maturity, and model-free implied variance. We provide further evidence that: (1) variance risk premium has a cleaner systematic component and ...
Working Paper
Variance risk premia, asset predictability puzzles, and macroeconomic uncertainty
This paper presents predictability evidence from the difference between implied and expected variances or variance risk premium that: (1) the variance difference measure predicts a significant positive risk premium across equity, bond, and credit markets; (2) the predictability is short-run, in that it peaks around one to four months and dies out as the horizon increases; and (3) such a short-run predictability is complementary to that of the standard predictor variables--P/E ratio, forward spread, and short rate. These findings are potentially justifiable by a general equilibrium model with ...
Working Paper
Effects of liquidity on the nondefault component of corporate yield spreads: evidence from intraday transactions data
We estimate the nondefault component of corporate bond yield spreads and examine its relationship with bond liquidity. We measure bond liquidity using intraday transactions data and estimate the default component using the term structure of credit default swaps spreads. With swap rate as the risk free rate, the estimated nondefault component is generally moderate but statistically significant for AA-, A-, and BBB-rated bonds and increasing in this order. With Treasury rate as the risk free rate, the estimated nondefault component is the largest in basis points for BBB-rated bonds but, as a ...