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Working Paper
The Pricing Kernel in Options
The empirical option valuation literature specifies the pricing kernel through the price of risk, or defines it implicitly as the ratio of risk-neutral and physical probabilities. Instead, we extend the economically appealing Rubinstein-Brennan kernels to a dynamic framework that allows pathand volatility-dependence. Because of low statistical power, kernels with different economic properties can produce similar overall option fit, even when they imply cross-sectional pricing anomalies and implausible risk premiums. Imposing parsimonious economic restrictions such as monotonicity and ...
Working Paper
A Tale of Two Option Markets: Pricing Kernels and Volatility Risk
Using prices of both S&P 500 options and recently introduced VIX options, we study asset pricing implications of volatility risk. While pointing out the joint pricing kernel is not identified nonparametrically, we propose model-free estimates of marginal pricing kernels of the market return and volatility conditional on the VIX. We find that the pricing kernel of market return exhibits a decreasing pattern given either a high or low VIX level, whereas the unconditional estimates present a U-shape. Hence, stochastic volatility is the key state variable responsible for the U-shape puzzle ...