Capital commitment

Twelve trillion dollars are allocated to private market funds that require outside investors to commit to transferring capital on demand. We show within a novel dynamic portfolio allocation model that ex-ante commitment has large effects on investors’ portfolios and welfare, and we quantify those effects. Investors are under-allocated to private market funds and are willing to pay a larger premium to adjust the quantity committed than to eliminate other frictions, like timing uncertainty and limited tradability. Perhaps counter-intuitively, commitment risk premiums increase with secondary market liquidity and they do not disappear when investments are spread over many funds

A Two-Factor Cointegrated Commodity Price Model with an Application to Spread Option Pricing

In this paper, we propose an easy-to-use yet comprehensive model for a system of cointegrated commodity prices. While retaining the exponential affine structure of previous approaches, our model allows for an arbitrary number of cointegration relationships. We show that the cointegration component allows capturing well-known features of commodity prices, i.e., upward sloping (contango) and downward sloping (backwardation) term-structures, smaller volatilities for longer maturities and an upward sloping correlation term structure. The model is calibrated to futures price data of ten commodities. The results provide compelling evidence of cointegration in the data. Implications for the prices of futures and options written on common commodity spreads (e.g., spark spread and crack spread) are thoroughly investigate

Pricing of idiosyncratic equity and variance risks

This paper decomposes the risk premia of individual stocks into contributions from systematic and idiosyncratic risks. I introduce an affine jump-diffusion model, which accounts for both the factor structure of asset returns and that of the variance of idiosyncratic returns. The estimation is performed on a time series of returns and option prices from 2006 to 2012. I find that investors not only require compensation for the systematic movements in returns and variance, but also for non hedgeable idiosyncratic risks. For the stocks of the Dow Jones, these risks account for an average of 50% and 80% of the equity and variance risk premia, respectively. I provide a categorization of sectors based on the risk profile of their Exchange Traded Funds and highlight the high prices of idiosyncratic risks in the Energy, Financial and Consumer Discretionary sectors. Other sectors are found to be appealing alternatives for investors who are not willing to be exposed to non diversifiable risks

Inferring volatility dynamics and risk premia from the S&P 500 and VIX markets

This paper studies the information content of the S&P 500 and VIX markets on the volatility of the S&P 500 returns. We estimate a flexible affine model based on a joint time series of underlying indexes and option prices on both markets. An extensive model specification analysis reveals that jumps and a stochastic level of reversion for the variance help reproduce risk-neutral distributions as well as the term structure of volatility smiles and of variance risk premia. We find that the S&P 500 and VIX derivatives prices are consistent in times of market calm but contain conflicting information on the variance during market distress