The Imprecision of volatility indexes

Abstract

Concerns about sampling noise arise when a VIX estimator is computed by aggregating several imprecise implied volatility estimates. We propose a bootstrap strategy to measure the imprecision of a model based VIX estimator. We find that the imprecision of VIX is economically significant. We propose a model selection strategy,where alternative statistical estimators of VIX are evaluated based on this imprecision.