“…The importance of the CEV model for traders is justified by its ability to accommodate two empirical stylized facts commonly observed in options markets, namely: the existence of an inverse relation between stock returns and realized volatility ( leverage effect ), as highlighted, for instance, by Bekaert and Wu () and Black (); and the negative correlation between the implied volatility and the strike price of an option contract ( implied volatility skew ), as documented, for example, in Dennis and Mayhew (). Therefore, it is with no surprise that the CEV model is still widely used nowadays in a variety of contexts, for example, by Ballestra and Cecere (), Chung and Shih (), Nunes (), and Ruas, Dias, and Nunes () for pricing and hedging plain‐vanilla American‐style options, or by Chung, Shih, and Tsai (,), Dias, Nunes, and Ruas (), Nunes, Ruas, and Dias (), and Tsai () in the case of barrier option contracts, just to mention a few.…”