Why do variance swaps exist?

Belén Nieto (), Alfonso Novales and Gonzalo Rubio ()
Additional contact information
Belén Nieto: Departamento de Economía financiera y Contabilidad, Universidad de Alicante, https://web.ua.es/es/researchgroupmffe/investigadores/nietodomenech.html
Gonzalo Rubio: Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera

No 2011-06, Documentos de Trabajo del ICAE from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Instituto Complutense de Análisis Económico

Abstract: This paper studies the determinants of the variance risk premium and concludes on the hedging possibilities offered by variance swaps. We start by showing that the variance risk premium responds to changes in higher order moments of the distribution of market returns. But the uncertainty that determines the variance risk premium –the fear by investors to deviations from Normality in returns- is also strongly related to a variety of risks: risk of default, employment growth risk, consumption growth risk, stock market risk and market illiquidity risk. Therefore, the variance risk premium could be interpreted as reflecting the market willingness to pay for hedging against financial and macroeconomic sources of risk. We provide additional evidence in support of that view.

Keywords: Variance risk premium; Non-normality; Economic risks; Hedging (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C14 G10 G12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-rmg and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/12520/1/1106.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucm:doicae:1106

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales. Pabellón prefabricado, 1ª Planta, ala norte. Campus de Somosaguas, 28223 - POZUELO DE ALARCÓN (MADRID)
https://www.ucm.es/f ... -de-trabajo-del-icae

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo del ICAE from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Instituto Complutense de Análisis Económico Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Águeda González Abad ().