Download or read book Option Pricing with Unobserved and Regime-Switching Volatility written by Sean D. Campbell and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper we use a regime-switching process to model the unobserved volatility of the underlying asset and derive a closed-form, risk-neutral option pricing formula. Specifically, our model implies the state price density (SPD) is a time-varying mixture of normals which can provide for time-varying excess kurtosis and skewness as agents learn about the state of volatility from realized returns. Furthermore, we show that our model generates the kinds of volatility quot;smilesquot; commonly found in option markets. We apply our two and three regime models to weekly Samp;P 500 option data and find our model fits the data better than other popular pricing models. Additionally, we find evidence that stock returns can be well-described by a markov switching framework with a very persistent low volatility regime followed by a less persistent moderate volatility regime and a highly non-persistent crash regime. Our estimation results don't suffer the so called quot;Peso Problemquot; as they come from option prices instead of the observed stock returns.