Endogenous exchange rate pass-through when nominal prices are set in advance

This paper develops a model of endogenous exchange rate pass-through within an open economy macroeconomic framework, where both pass-through and the exchange rate are simultaneously determined, and interact with one another. Pass-through is endogenous because firms choose the currency in which they set their export prices. There is a unique equilibrium rate of pass-through under the condition that exchange rate volatility rises as the degree of pass-through falls. We show that the relationship between exchange rate volatility and economic structure may be substantially affected by the presence of endogenous pass-through. Our key results show that pass-through is related to the relative stability of monetary policy. Countries with relatively low volatility of money growth will have relatively low rates of exchange rate pass-through, while countries with relatively high volatility of money growth will have relatively high pass-through rates.     

Market volatility and the demand for hedging in stock index futures

This study examines the relation between stock market volatility and the demand for hedging in S&P 500 stock index futures contracts. Open interest is used as a proxy for hedging demand. The analysis employs unique data that identify separately the open interest of large hedgers, large speculators, and smaller traders. Volatility estimates are decomposed into expected and unexpected components, to assess whether traders’ reactions to volatility depend upon its predictability. Results indicate that daily open interest for hedgers increases when unexpected volatility increases. Increases in unexpected volatility may cause hedgers to raise their estimates of future expected volatility, and hence increase their demand for hedging. Open interest of speculators is not related to expected volatility, and is only weakly related to unexpected volatility. The increase in the participation of hedgers in periods of higher volatility is significantly larger than the increase in the participation of speculators. The results suggest that increases in stock market volatility increase the demand for hedging. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 20: 105–125, 2000     

Systemic risk in global volatility spillover networks: Evidence from option-implied volatility indices

With option-implied volatility indices, we identify networks of global volatility spillovers and examine time-varying systemic risk across global financial markets. The U.S. stock market is the center of the network and plays a dominant role in the spread of volatility spillover to other markets. The global systemic risks have intensified since the Federal Reserve exited from quantitative easing, hiked interest rate, and shrank its balance sheet. We further show that the U.S. monetary tightening is an important catalyst for the intensifying global systemic risk. Our findings highlight the pernicious effects of monetary tightening after an era of cheap money.     

Volatility and trading demands in stock index futures

In this study we examine how volatility and the futures risk premium affect trading demands for hedging and speculation in the S&P 500 Stock Index futures contracts. To ascertain if different volatility measures matter in affecting the result, we employ three volatility estimates. Our empirical results show a positive relation between volatility and open interest for both hedgers and speculators, suggesting that an increase in volatility motivates both hedgers and speculators to engage in more trading in futures markets. However, the influence of volatility on futures trading, especially for hedging, is statistically significant only when spot volatility is used. We also find that the demand to trade by speculators is more sensitive to changes in the futures risk premium than is the demand to trade by hedgers. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 23:399–414, 2003     

Long memory in continuous-time stochastic volatility models

This paper studies a classical extension of the Black and Scholes model for option pricing, often known as the Hull and White model. Our specification is that the volatility process is assumed not only to be stochastic, but also to have long-memory features and properties. We study here the implications of this continuous-time long-memory model, both for the volatility process itself as well as for the global asset price process. We also compare our model with some discrete time approximations. Then the issue of option pricing is addressed by looking at theoretical formulas and properties of the implicit volatilities as well as statistical inference tractability. Lastly, we provide a few simulation experiments to illustrate our results.     

An empirical comparison of continuous time models of the short term interest rate

This article tests the performance of a wide variety of well-known continuous time models—with particular emphasis on the Black, Derman, and Toy (1990; henceforth BDT) term structure model—in capturing the stochastic behavior of the short term interest rate volatility. Many popular interest rate models are nested within a more flexible time-varying BDT framework that allows us to compare the models and find the proper specification of the dynamics of short rates. The empirical results indicate that the equilibrium models that do not allow the drift and diffusion parameters to vary over time and parameterize the volatility only as a function of interest rate levels overemphasize the sensitivity of volatility to the level of interest rate and fail to model adequately the serial correlation in conditional variances. On the other hand, the GARCH-based arbitrage-free models with time-dependent parameters in the drift and diffusion functions define the volatility only as a function of unexpected information shocks and fail to capture adequately the relationship between interest rate levels and volatility. This study shows that the most successful models in capturing the dynamics of short term interest rates are those that introduce time-dependent parameters to the short rate process and define the conditional volatility as a function of both the interest rate levels and the last period's unexpected news. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 777–797, 1999     

货币供给冲击、货币需求冲击与中国宏观经济波动

基于由贝叶斯技术估计的新凯恩斯动态随机一般均衡(DSGE)模型,识别和分析货币供给与货币需求冲击对产出和通货膨胀波动的影响,结果表明:货币供给冲击对产出和通货膨胀波动均能够产生同向影响,但对产出波动的影响不明显,仅能解释其不足2%的波动,而对通货膨胀波动的影响比较强,长期内可以解释其26%以上的波动;货币需求冲击对产出和通货膨胀波动的影响都不明显,长期内对二者波动的解释能力均低于0.6%。因此,在应对通胀压力时,央行可以运用数量型货币政策工具,对高通胀势头实施积极的紧缩性宏观调控。     

A reexamination of the demand for UK exports: Evidence from an error correction model

This article examines the demand for UK exports and is focused on five issues. It starts by examining the stochastic properties of the relevant time series. Special attention is paid to the model specification, its dynamic structure, and its temporal stability. In addition, the potential effect of exchange rate uncertainty on export demand is considered. The empirical results show that the determinants of the demand for UK exports are foreign economic activity, export price, foreign prices, and exchange rate uncertainty. The results further indicate that exchange rate uncertainty has a negative effect on exports and that the overall export demand equation requires the inclusion of such a variable in order to exhibit structural stability. Trade policy in the UK, therefore must take into account the response of export demand to changes in real exchange rate volatility.     

Is there information in the volatility skew?

Since the 1987 crash, option prices have exhibited a strong negative skew, implying higher implied volatility for out‐of‐the‐money puts than at‐ and in‐the‐money puts. This has resulted in incorporating multiple jumps and stochastic volatility within the data generating process to improve the Black–Scholes model in an attempt to capture negative skewness and a highly leptokurtic distribution. The general conclusion is that there is a large jump premium in the short term, which best explains the significant negative skew for short maturity options. Alternative explanations for the negative skew are related to market liquidity driven by demand shocks and supply shortages. Regardless of the explanation for the negative skew, we assess the information content in the shape of the skew to infer if the option market can accurately forecast stock market crashes and/or spikes upward. We demonstrate, using all options on the S&P 100 from 1984–2006, that the shape of the skew can reveal with significant probability when the market will crash or spike. However, we find the magnitude of the spike prediction is not economically significant. Our findings are strongest for the short‐term out‐of‐the money puts, consistent with the notion of investors' aversion to large negative movements. We also find that the power of the crash/spike prediction decreases with an increase in the time to option maturity. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 27:921–959, 2007     

The impact of parallel market exchange rate volatility and oil exports on real GDP in Syria: Evidence from the ARDL approach

This paper investigates the impact of parallel market exchange rate volatility and trade on real GDP and real GDP growth in the Syrian economy over the period of 1990Q1–2010Q4. To this end, we first construct a parallel market exchange rate volatility indicator. Second, we estimate an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model where we include our indicator of volatility among the main determinants of real GDP. Our findings imply that real GDP can be explained by three main variables: parallel market exchange rate, money supply, and oil exports. The long-run equilibrium reveals that parallel market exchange rate volatility has a negative impact on real GDP compared to the positive impact of money supply and oil exports. In contrast, the short-run impact of parallel market exchange rate volatility on real GDP growth is positive and very small counter to the long-run impact. Furthermore, the coefficient of the error correction term of the estimated ARDL model indicates that real GDP deviation from the equilibrium level will be corrected by about 10% after each quarter.     

INTEREST RATES IN POST-KEYNESIAN MODELS OF GROWTH AND DISTRIBUTION

The goal of this article is to make a heuristic and comparative presentation of how the major post-Keynesian models of growth and distribution integrate money, more specifically interest rates, into their framework. Five variants will be considered, all constructed on the basis of the newer Kaleckian model. It will be shown that increases in real interest rates may have surprising effects on effective demand. It will also be shown that accumulation rates and leverage ratios need not move together. The latter finding reinforces a major hypothesis of the analysis, that is, real interest rates are an exogenous distributive variable.     

The performance of VIX option pricing models: Empirical evidence beyond simulation

We examine the pricing performance of VIX option models. Such models possess a wide‐range of underlying characteristics regarding the behavior of both the S&P500 index and the underlying VIX. Our tests employ three representative models for VIX options: Whaley ( 1993 ), Grunbichler and Longstaff ( 1996 ), Carr and Lee ( 2007 ), Lin and Chang ( 2009 ), who test four stochastic volatility models, as well as to previous simulation results of VIX option models. We find that no model has small pricing errors over the entire range of strike prices and times to expiration. In particular, out‐of‐the‐money VIX options are difficult to price, with Grunbichler and Longstaff's mean‐reverting model producing the smallest dollar errors in this category. Whaley's Black‐like option model produces the best results for in‐the‐money VIX options. However, the Whaley model does under/overprice out‐of‐the‐money call/put VIX options, which is opposite the behavior of stock index option pricing models. VIX options exhibit a volatility skew opposite the skew of index options. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark31:251–281, 2011     

AN EQUILIBRIUM GUIDE TO DESIGNING AFFINE PRICING MODELS

The paper examines equilibrium models based on Epstein–Zin preferences in a framework in which exogenous state variables follow affine jump diffusion processes. A main insight is that the equilibrium asset prices can be computed using a standard machinery of affine asset pricing theory by imposing parametric restrictions on market prices of risk, determined inside the model by preference and model parameters. An appealing characteristic of the general equilibrium setup is that the state variables have an intuitive and testable interpretation as driving the consumption and dividend dynamics. We present a detailed example where large shocks (jumps) in consumption volatility translate into negative jumps in equilibrium prices of the assets as agents demand a higher premium to compensate for higher risks. This endogenous “leverage effect,” which is purely an equilibrium outcome in the economy, leads to significant premiums for out‐of‐the‐money put options. Our model is thus able to produce an equilibrium “volatility smirk,” which realistically mimics that observed for index options.     

Switching asymmetric GARCH and options on a volatility index

Few proposed types of derivative securities have attracted as much attention and interest as option contracts on volatility. Grunbichler and Longstaff (1996) is the only study that proposes a model to value options written on a volatility index. Their model, which is based on modeling volatility as a GARCH process, does not take into account the switching regime and asymmetry properties of volatility. We show that the Grunbichler and Longstaff (1996) model underprices a three‐month option by about 10%. A Switching Regime Asymmetric GARCH is used to model the generating process of security returns. The comparison between the switching regime model and the traditional uni‐regime model among GARCH, EGARCH, and GJR‐GARCH demonstrates that a switching regime EGARCH model fits the data best. Next, the values of European call options written on a volatility index are computed using Monte Carlo integration. When comparing the values of the option based on the Switching Regime Asymmetric GARCH model and the traditional GARCH specification, it is found that the option values obtained from the different processes are very different. This clearly shows that the Grunbichler‐Longstaff model is too stylized to be used in pricing derivatives on a volatility index. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 24:251–282, 2004     

A CONSISTENT PRICING MODEL FOR INDEX OPTIONS AND VOLATILITY DERIVATIVES

We propose a flexible framework for modeling the joint dynamics of an index and a set of forward variance swap rates written on this index. Our model reproduces various empirically observed properties of variance swap dynamics and enables volatility derivatives and options on the underlying index to be priced consistently, while allowing for jumps in volatility and returns. An affine specification using Lévy processes as building blocks leads to analytically tractable pricing formulas for volatility derivatives, such as VIX options, as well as efficient numerical methods for pricing of European options on the underlying asset. The model has the convenient feature of decoupling the vanilla skews from spot/volatility correlations and allowing for different conditional correlations in large and small spot/volatility moves. We show that our model can simultaneously fit prices of European options on S&P 500 across strikes and maturities as well as options on the VIX volatility index.     

The drift factor in biased futures index pricing models: A new look

The presence of bias in index futures prices has been investigated in various research studies. Redfield ( 11 ) asserted that the U.S. Dollar Index (USDX) futures contract traded on the U.S. Cotton Exchange (now the FINEX division of the New York Board of Trade) could be systematically arbitraged for nontrivial returns because it is expressed in so‐called “European terms” (foreign currency units/U.S. dollar). Eytan, Harpaz, and Krull ( 4 ) (EHK) developed a theoretical factor using Brownian motion to correct for the European terms and the bias due to the USDX index being expressed as a geometric average. Harpaz, Krull, and Yagil ( 5 ) empirically tested the EHK index. They used the historical volatility to proxy the EHK volatility specification. Since 1990, it has become more commonplace to use option‐implied volatility for forecasting future volatility. Therefore, we have substituted option implied volatilities into EHK's correction factor and hypothesized that the correction factor is “better” ex ante and therefore should lead to better futures model pricing. We tested this conjecture using twelve contracts from 1995 through 1997 and found that the use of implied volatility did not improve the bias correction over the use of historical volatility. Furthermore, no matter which volatility specification we used, the model futures price appeared to be mis‐specified. To investigate further, we added a simple naïve δ based on a modification of the adaptive expectations model. Repeating the tests using this naïve “drift” factor, it performed substantially better than the other two specifications. Our conclusion is that there may be a need to take a new look at the drift‐factor specification currently in use. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 22:579–598, 2002     

A UNIFIED FRAMEWORK FOR PRICING CREDIT AND EQUITY DERIVATIVES

We propose a model which can be jointly calibrated to the corporate bond term structure and equity option volatility surface of the same company. Our purpose is to obtain explicit bond and equity option pricing formulas that can be calibrated to find a risk neutral model that matches a set of observed market prices. This risk neutral model can then be used to price more exotic, illiquid, or over‐the‐counter derivatives. We observe that our model matches the equity option implied volatility surface well since we properly account for the default risk in the implied volatility surface. We demonstrate the importance of accounting for the default risk and stochastic interest rate in equity option pricing by comparing our results to Fouque et al., which only accounts for stochastic volatility.     

STOCHASTIC VOLATILITY MODELS AND THE PRICING OF VIX OPTIONS

In this paper, we examine and compare the performance of a variety of continuous‐time volatility models in their ability to capture the behavior of the VIX. The “3/2‐ model” with a diffusion structure which allows the volatility of volatility changes to be highly sensitive to the actual level of volatility is found to outperform all other popular models tested. Analytic solutions for option prices on the VIX under the 3/2‐model are developed and then used to calibrate at‐the‐money market option prices.     

影响我国广义货币需求因素的实证分析

运用现代货币数量理论,以我国1996—2009年货币数据为样本．建立长期广义货币需求函数进行实证分析,其结果表明：广义货币需求的长期收入弹性均大于1;长期货币需求的利率弹性都小于货币需求的收入弹性;预期通货膨胀率对广义货币需求影响显著,呈现负向变动关系,即随着通货膨胀预期上升,对货币需求减少。这一结论同时表明。我们可根据货币需求之间的弹性关系检验货币政策的有效性,以达到控制货币供给量,完善货币需求体系。维持物价指数的相对稳定的目的。     

Aggregate Volatility and Market Jump Risk: An Option‐Based Explanation to Size and Value Premia

It is well documented that stock returns have different sensitivities to changes in aggregate volatility, however less is known about their sensitivity to market jump risk. By using S&P 500 crash‐neutral at‐the‐money straddle and out‐of‐money put returns as proxies for aggregate volatility and market jump risk, I document significant differences between volatility and jump loadings of value versus growth, and small versus big portfolios. In particular, small (big) and value (growth) portfolios exhibit negative (positive) and significant volatility and jump betas. I also provide further evidence that both volatility and jump risk factors are priced and negative. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 34:34–55, 2014