We develop a new nonparametric approach for estimating the risk-neutral density of asset prices and reformulate its estimation into a double-constrained optimization problem. We evaluate our approach using the S\&P 500 market option prices from 1996 to 2015. A comprehensive cross-validation study shows that our approach outperforms the existing nonparametric quartic B-spline and cubic spline methods, as well as the parametric method based on the Normal Inverse Gaussian distribution. As an application, we use the proposed density estimator to price long-term variance swaps, and the model-implied prices match reasonably well with those of the variance future downloaded from the CBOE website.

Groups of firms often achieve a competitive advantage through the formation of geo-industrial clusters. Although many exemplary clusters, such as Hollywood or Silicon Valley, have been frequently studied, systematic approaches to identify and analyze the hierarchical structure of the geo-industrial clusters at the global scale are rare. In this work, we use LinkedIn's employment histories of more than 500 million users over 25 years to construct a labor flow network of over 4 million firms across the world and apply a recursive network community detection algorithm to reveal the hierarchical structure of geo-industrial clusters. We show that the resulting geo-industrial clusters exhibit a stronger association between the influx of educated-workers and financial performance, compared to existing aggregation units. Furthermore, our additional analysis of the skill sets of educated-workers supplements the relationship between the labor flow of educated-workers and productivity growth. We argue that geo-industrial clusters defined by labor flow provide better insights into the growth and the decline of the economy than other common economic units.

This paper is devoted to the important yet little explored subject of the market impact of limit orders. Our analysis is based on a proprietary database of metaorders - large orders that are split into smaller pieces before being sent to the market. We first address the case of aggressive limit orders and then, that of passive limit orders. In both cases, we provide empirical evidence of a power law behaviour for the temporary market impact. The relaxation of the price following the end of the metaorder is also studied, and the long-term impact is shown to stabilize at a level of approximately two-thirds of the maximum impact. Finally, a fair pricing condition during the life cycle of the metaorders is empirically validated.

This paper deals with a fundamental subject that has seldom been addressed in recent years, that of market impact in the options market. Our analysis is based on a proprietary database of metaorders-large orders that are split into smaller pieces before being sent to the market on one of the main Asian markets. In line with our previous work on the equity market [Said et al., 2018], we propose an algorithmic approach to identify metaorders, based on some implied volatility parameters, the at the money forward volatility and at the money forward skew. In both cases, we obtain results similar to the now well understood equity market: Square-root law, Fair Pricing Condition and Market Impact Dynamics.

Empirical studies indicate the presence of multi-scales in the volatility of underlying assets: a fast-scale on the order of days and a slow-scale on the order of months. In our previous works, we have studied the portfolio optimization problem in a Markovian setting under each single scale, the slow one in [Fouque and Hu, SIAM J. Control Optim., 55 (2017), 1990-2023], and the fast one in [Hu, Proceedings of IEEE CDC 2018, accepted]. This paper is dedicated to the analysis when the two scales coexist in a Markovian setting. We study the terminal wealth utility maximization problem when the volatility is driven by both fast- and slow-scale factors. We first propose a zeroth-order strategy, and rigorously establish the first order approximation of the associated problem value. This is done by analyzing the corresponding linear partial differential equation (PDE) via regular and singular perturbation techniques, as in the single-scale cases. Then, we show the asymptotic optimality of our proposed strategy within a specific family of admissible controls. Interestingly, we highlight that a pure PDE approach does not work in the multi-scale case and, instead, we use the so-called epsilon-martingale decomposition. This completes the analysis of portfolio optimization in both fast mean-reverting and slowly-varying Markovian stochastic environments.

Certainty Equivalent is a utility-based measure that performs as a measure in which investors are indifferent between this measure and investment that holds some uncertainty. Therefore, it plays an essential role in utility-based decision making. One of the most extensively used risk measures is the Value at Risk, which is investigated and used by both researchers and practitioners as a powerful tool that measures the risk under some quantile level which allows focusing on the extreme amount of losses. In this paper, we propose a natural generalization of the Certainty Equivalent measure that, similar to the Value at Risk measure, is focusing on the tail distribution of the risk, and thus, focusing on extreme financial and insurance risk events. We then investigate the fundamental properties of the proposed measure and show its unique features and implications in the risk measurement process. Furthermore, we derive formulas for truncated elliptical models of losses and provide formulas for selected members of such models.

In this paper, we build tests for the presence of residual noise in a model where the market microstructure noise is a known parametric function of some variables from the limit order book. The tests compare two distinct quasi-maximum likelihood estimators of volatility, where the related model includes a residual noise in the market microstructure noise or not. The limit theory is investigated in a general nonparametric framework. In the presence of residual noise, we examine the central limit theory of the related quasi-maximum likelihood estimation approach.