Short-time at-the-money skew and rough fractional volatility

Abstract: The Black-Scholes implied volatility skew at the money of SPX options is known to obey a power law with respect to the time-to-maturity. We construct a model of the underlying asset price process which is dynamically consistent to the power law. The volatility process of the model is driven by a fractional Brownian motion with Hurst parameter less than half. The fractional Brownian motion is correlated with a Brownian motion which drives the asset price process. We derive an asymptotic expansion of the implied volatility as the time-to-maturity tends to zero. For this purpose we introduce a new approach to validate such an expansion, which enables us to treat more general models than in the literature. The local-stochastic volatility model is treated as well under an essentially minimal regularity condition in order to show such a standard model cannot be dynamically consistent to the power law.