On the skew and curvature of implied and local volatilities

Abstract

In this paper, we study the relationship between the short-end of the local and the implied volatility surfaces. Our results, based on Malliavin calculus techniques, recover the recent $\frac{1}{H+3/2}$ rule (where $H$ denotes the Hurst parameter of the volatility process) for rough volatilitites (see Bourgey, De Marco, Friz, and Pigato (2022)), that states that the short-time skew slope of the at-the-money implied volatility is $\frac{1}{H+3/2}$ the corresponding slope for local volatilities. Moreover, we see that the at-the-money short-end curvature of the implied volatility can be written in terms of the short-end skew and curvature of the local volatility and viceversa, and that this relationship depends on $H$.