Thursday, October 20th
5:45 PM Registration 6:00 PM Seminar Begins 7:30 PM Reception
Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure the variance term premium, we estimate a dynamic term-structure model that prices variance swaps across the US, UK, Europe, and Japan. The model decomposes the variance swap curve into term-structures of risk premia and expected quantities of risk. Empirically, we document a strong factor structure in global variance swap rates and find that variance term premia are negatively correlated with the wealth of the financial intermediary sector. Our results support the hypothesis that financial intermediaries are the marginal investor in the variance swap market.
Biography
Erik Vogt is a financial economist in the Capital Markets Function of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His main research interests are in asset pricing, financial econometrics, volatility and liquidity risk, and high-frequency data across a variety of asset classes, including equities, Treasuries, derivatives, and corporate bonds. His research on market liquidity and broker-dealers has received media coverage in Bloomberg, Reuters, and Yahoo Finance, among others, and was also cited in U.S. Senate testimony before the Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment, and the Subcommittee on Economic Policy, Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Erik actively serves as a referee for several peer-reviewed journals, including the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of Empirical Finance, the Journal of Financial Econometrics, and Quantitative Finance. Erik joined the New York Fed in July 2014 and holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Duke University and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Economics from the London School of Economics. Prior to graduate school, he worked as an Associate Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
About the Series
The IAQF's Thalesians Seminar Series is a joint effort on the part of the IAQF (www.iaqf.org) and the Thalesians (www.thalesians.com). The goal of the series is to provide a forum for the exchange of new ideas and results related to the field of quantitative finance. This goal is accomplished by hosting seminars where leading practitioners and academics present new work, and following the seminars with a reception to facilitate further interaction and discussion.
