Download or read book Three Essays on the Information Content of Stock Options written by Zekun Wu and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays that explore the information content embedded in equity options. The results improve our understanding of the cross-section of option returns, informed trading in the options market, and the industry effect of IPOs. In the first essay, we study the relation between option-implied skewness (IS) and the crosssection of option returns under daily hedging to better understand skewness pricing in isolation from lower moments. Creating portfolios of delta-hedged (D-hedged) and delta-vega-hedged (DV-hedged) options with daily rebalancing, we find that IS is negatively (positively) related to call (put) option returns, but the relation to put options is statistically significant only during economic recessions. The relation is more substantial when the underlying stock has a larger market beta and when the firm has more severe information opacity. Our results suggest that investors' skewness preference grows stronger with greater market risk and lower information quality. In the second essay, we examined the informed trading in the options market before FDA drug advisory committee meetings. We find significant abnormal options trading volume before both meeting dates and report creation dates, particularly for small drug firms. Abnormal volume significantly predicts post-meeting stock returns. Informed traders prefer out-of-the-money options and choose maturities to cover the dates when reports are publicly released. They prefer to sell options close to the meeting date, perhaps to capture returns from both expected stock price changes and the sharp drop in implied volatility post-meeting. In the third essay, I investigate the effect of initial public offerings (IPOs) on industry competitors' options market. I find that rival firms' put (call) options volume increases (decreases) around IPOs, leading to price pressure on call options relative to put options as measured by the implied volatility spread. Rival firms' reaction in the options market also predicts the IPO firms' post-IPO stock performance. Lastly, rival firms with strong operating income experience less negative impact in the options market, suggesting competitive operation performance help stabilize rival firms' options market around IPOs.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Information Content in Option Prices written by Wan Ni Lai and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Information Content of Options written by Yonatan Navon and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this thesis is to examine the information content of stock options in financial markets. A key question in financial economics is how information diffuses across markets and how quickly it is reflected in security prices. This thesis aims at exploring this question by investigating the informational role that options play in financial markets. This is achieved by exploring the joint cross section of option and bond prices, the informational role of options in seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), and the information content of options trading prior to announcements of changes to the S&P 500 Index.The thesis comprises three essays, each exploring the information content of equity options trading from a different angle. The first essay examines the joint cross section of option implied volatility and corporate bond returns. Theoretical and empirical work in finance suggests that stocks and bonds of the same issuing firm should share common risk factors. Therefore, new information about a firm should affect both its stock and bond prices. However, if one market offers trading incentives over other markets, informed traders and traders with better ability to process information may choose to trade in that market over the others. As a result, markets that provide advantages to informed traders will incorporate information prior to other markets. The empirical analysis in this chapter reveals that options trading is strongly predictive of corporate bond returns. A strategy of buying (selling) the portfolio with the lowest (highest) changes in option implied volatility yields an average monthly excess bond return of 1.03%. This strategy is statistically highly significant and economically very meaningful and indicates that information is incorporated into option prices prior to bond prices. In contrast, I find no evidence that bond prices incorporate information prior to option or stock prices. Since bond investors are generally sophisticated institutional investors who process information efficiently and the predictive ability of options is persistent, I conclude that informed trading rather than superior information processing abilities is responsible for the predictive ability of options.The second essay explores the information content of option implied volatility around the announcements and issue dates of SEOs. The literature on SEOs indicates that announcements and issue dates contain important information about firms and therefore provide profitable opportunities for traders with private information. While prior research has focused on the information content of short sales around SEOs, this study focuses on the information content of options which can act as an alternative for short selling. The empirical analysis provides evidence of informed trading in the options market around SEO announcements. Around SEO issue dates, I find that higher demand for put options is significantly related to larger issue discounts which is consistent with the manipulative trading hypothesis. The results in this study indicate that regulators should consider extending the short-sale restrictions of Rule 105 to restrict trading in related securities.Finally, the third essay investigates the information content of options prior to the S&P 500 Index inclusion and exclusion announcements. These announcements are unique events since they are not announced by the firm and, as stated by S&P, they should convey no new information. In addition, the large abnormal returns observed following these announcements make them distinctive ground for testing the informational role of options. Consistent with the notion that informed traders operate in the options market, the empirical results in this essay indicate that there is a significant relationship between options trading preceding index inclusion announcements and abnormal returns following these announcements. In contrast, I find no evidence for a relationship between options trading and abnormal returns following exclusion announcements.

Download or read book Three Essays in Asset Pricing written by Mehdi Karoui and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This thesis consists of three essays that explore alternative approaches to extracting information from option data, and, along somewhat different lines, examine the channels through which liquidity is priced in equity options.The first essay proposes a novel approach to extracting option-implied equity premia, and empirically examines the information content of these risk premia for forecasting the stock market return. Our approach does not require specifying the functional form of the pricing kernel, and does not impose any restrictions on investors' preferences. We only assume the existence of put and call options which complete the market, and show that the implied equity premium can be inferred from expected excess returns on a portfolio of options. An empirical investigation of S&P 500 index options yields the following conclusions: (i) the implied equity premium predicts stock market returns; (ii) the implied equity premium consistently outperforms variables commonly used in the forecasting literature both in- and out-of-sample; (iii) the implied equity premium is positively related to future returns and negatively related to current returns, as theoretically expected.The second essay studies the effect of illiquidity on equity option returns. Illiquidity is well-known to be a significant determinant of stock and bond returns. We are the first to report on illiquidity premia in equity option markets using a large cross-section of firms. An increase in option illiquidity decreases the current option price and predicts higher expected delta-hedged option returns. This effect is statistically and economically significant, and it is consistent with existing evidence that market makers in the equity options market hold net long positions. The illiquidity premium is robust across puts and calls, across maturities and moneyness, as well as across different empirical approaches. It is also robust when controlling for various firm-specific variables including a standard measure of illiquidity of the underlying stock. For long term options, we find evidence of a liquidity risk factor. In the third essay, we demonstrate that in multifactor asset pricing models, prices of risk for factors that are nonlinear functions of the market return can be readily obtained using data on index returns and index options. We apply this general result to the measurement of the conditional price of coskewness and cokurtosis risk. The price of coskewness risk corresponds to the spread between the physical and the risk-neutral second moments, and the price of cokurtosis risk corresponds to the spread between the physical and the risk-neutral third moments. Estimates of these prices of risk have the expected sign, and they lead to reasonable risk premia. An out-of-sample analysis of factor models with coskewness and cokurtosis risk indicates that the new estimates of the price of risk improve the models. performance. The models also robustly outperform competitors such as the CAPM and the Fama-French model." --

Download or read book Three Essays on Executive Stock Options written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Option Market Information Content Market Segmentation and Fear written by Mishuk Anwar Chowdhury and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay tests whether stock returns can be predicted using divergence from put-call parity. Using a robust methodology that controls for the early exercise premium of American put and call options, the study shows that stocks with upside divergence from put-call parity outperform stocks with downside divergence from put-call parity. Predictability is persistent over multiple holding periods and divergence is also predictive of tail events. The second essay examines segmentation of equity and option markets in the presence of information asymmetry. The study uses the slope of the implied volatility skew as a proxy for negative jump risk, option implied stock price as a measure of deviation from put-call parity, and the daily short-sell volume ratio as a measure of negative information flow in the equity market. The option market based signals predict future returns more reliably than the short-sell based signals. Short-sellers only profit when their convictions line-up with negative signals in the option market. The third essay introduces a measure of fear derived from the implied volatility smile. The study examines the relationship between fear and the cross section of option returns. The results show that put options written on stocks with high fear premium outperform put options written on stocks with low fear premium. Fear does not predict the realization of a tail event. This finding confirms the irrational nature of fear.

Download or read book Three Essays on Capital Market with Incomplete and Asymmetric Information written by Chaoli Guo and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "Three Essays on Capital Market With Incomplete and Asymmetric Information" by Chaoli, Guo, 郭朝莉, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: This thesis includes one essay on incomplete information and two essays on the capital market implications of asymmetric information. The acquisition of information and its dissemination to all economic units are central activities in capital markets. Limits to information diffusion may exist when market participants have limited processing ability or when market structure causes information asymmetry to persist. Merton (1987) proposes a simple capital market equilibrium model with incomplete information, in which difference in a stock's investor recognition affects its cost of capital. Myers and Majluf (1984) lay out the theoretical foundation for the role of asymmetric information in corporate finance and its capital market implications. The first essay tests and offers support to Merton's (1987) theory. In the U.S. market, using the breadth of ownership among retail investors as a proxy for investor recognition, I show that a long-short portfolio based on the annual change of shareholder base earns a compounded annual abnormal return of 6.42% after controlling for the Fama-French three factors. These results are more pronounced among young, low visibility and high idiosyncratic volatility stocks. Moreover, I present evidence that the investor recognition effect can explain approximately 20% of the puzzling net equity issuance effect documented by Pontiff and Woodgate (2008). The second essay suggests a novel signaling mechanism in the framework of asymmetric information. When a firm's convertible debt is issued, it is not only determined by the fundamentals of the firm such as past stock performance, but also related to whether this performance is realized during the tenure of current CEO who decides the issues. I define the performance that the current CEO achieves in the firm ever since the CEO comes to the helm as CEO-specific performance. Higher CEOspecific performance leads to (1) a higher probability of convertible issues, and (2) a less negative abnormal stock return in response to the convertible issue announcement, controlling for other firm characteristics. These evidences indicate that CEO-specific performance serves as a credible information signal to influence the adverse selection costs between the firm and outside investors in convertible bond financing. The third essay explores the possibility of asymmetric information in explaining the pronounced share issue anomaly in the cross-sectional variations of stock returns, as documented by Pontiff and Woodgate (2008). A lot of equity share issue and repurchase actions are actively determined by the decision of corporate stakeholders, such as employees at the stock options exercises. As these stakeholders hold a large amount of private information about the firm, it is in their optimal decisions to try to time the exercise of their share purchase activity, but outside investors are likely to fail to interpret the information revealed from these actions. I present strong evidence that a negative relation between share issues and stock returns is affected to a greater extent when the information asymmetry problem is more severe. DOI: 10.5353/

Download or read book Three Essays in Financial Markets The Bright Side of Financial Derivatives Options Trading and Firm Innovation written by Iván Blanco and published by Ed. Universidad de Cantabria. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do financial derivatives enhance or impede innovation? We aim to answer this question by examining the relationship between equity options markets and standard measures of firm innovation. Our baseline results show that firms with more options trading activity generate more patents and patent citations per dollar of R&D invested. We then investigate how more active options markets affect firms' innovation strategy. Our results suggest that firms with greater trading activity pursue a more creative, diverse and risky innovation strategy. We discuss potential underlying mechanisms and show that options appear to mitigate managerial career concerns that would induce managers to take actions that boost short-term performance measures. Finally, using several econometric specifications that try to account for the potential endogeneity of options trading, we argue that the positive effect of options trading on firm innovation is causal.

Download or read book Essays on Information in Options Markets written by Mr. Travis Lake Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first chapter, my coauthor and I examine the information content of option and equity volumes when trade direction is unobserved. In a multimarket asymmetric information model, equity short-sale costs result in a negative relation between relative option volume and future firm value. In our empirical tests, firms in the lowest decile of the option to stock volume ratio (O/S) outperform the highest decile by 0.34% per week (19.3% annualized). Our model and empirics both indicate that O/S is a stronger signal when short-sale costs are high or option leverage is low. O/S also predicts future firm-specific earnings news, consistent with O/S reflecting private information. In the second chapter, I show that in many asset pricing models, the equity market's expected return is a time-invariant linear function of its conditional variance, which can be estimated from options markets. However, I show that when the relation between conditional means and variances is state-dependent, an observer requires the combined information in multiple variance horizons to distinguish among the states and thereby reveal the equity risk premium. Empirically, I show that while the VIX by itself has little predictive power for future S & P 500 returns, the VIX term structure predicts next-quarter S & P 500 returns with a 5.2% adjusted R-squared.

Download or read book Essays on Stock Options written by Iskra Kalodera and published by Tectum - Der Wissenschaftsverlag. This book was released on 2011-07 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses exclusively on stock options, analyzing their pricing, liquidity, and information transmission empirically. With the help of discrete choice modeling and regression analysis, it offers new insights into the behavior of stock option liquidity as well as the influence of overall market liquidity on option prices. Many observed phenomena find explanation through the market microstructure. The book also provides the most comprehensive analysis of equity options for the German market so far and serves as a guide to up-to-date empirical topics for both researchers and practitioners.

Download or read book Three essays on empirical finance written by Tse-Chun Lin and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing written by Gang Li and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays on empirical asset pricing. In the first essay, I study the relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and expected returns of risky assets. I find that when the true asset pricing model cannot be identified, the idiosyncratic volatility obtained from a misspecified model contains information regarding the hedge portfolio in Merton's (1973) ICAPM. Empirically, I find that from 1815 to 2018, a combination of equal-weighted idiosyncratic volatility (EWIV) and value-weighted idiosyncratic volatility (VWIV) can strongly forecast stock market returns over short- and long-term horizons. Furthermore, EWIV and VWIV jointly can explain the cross-section of average stock returns. I show that the combination of EWIV and VWIV is a proxy for the conditional covariance risk in the ICAPM. The deduction also provides new insights concerning the tail risk measure proposed by Kelly and Jiang (2014). The second essay is a joint work with Bing Han. We propose a new and robust predictor of stock market returns and real economic activities based on information from equity options. We aggregate the difference in implied volatilities of at-the-money call and put options across stocks and find that the aggregate implied volatility spread (IVS) is significantly and positively related to future stock market returns. We attribute the predictive power to common informed trading in equity options instead of time-varying risk premium. The third essay, coauthored with Yoontae Jeon and Raymond Kan, studies the expected option return under an extended Black-Scholes model that incorporates the presence of stock return autocorrelation. We show that expected returns of both call and put options are increasing functions of return autocorrelation coefficient of the underlying stock. We find strong empirical evidence from the cross-section of average returns of equity options to support this prediction. Average returns of calls and puts as well as straddle returns all show monotonically increasing relationship with the degree of underlying stock's return autocorrelation coefficient. We also examine how the information on stock return autocorrelation helps investors to improve the out-of-sample performance of their portfolios.

Download or read book Three Essays on Option Implied Information written by Markus Ludwig and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Stock Market Volatility and Stock Return Predictability written by Shu Yan and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Social Context of the Exercising and Dating of Stock Options written by Fiona Kun Yao and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation investigates stock options-related arrangements by individual executives and firms from a sociological point of view. The first study in this dissertation explores the antecedents of stock option exercises by executives in Chinese state-owned firms, behaviors considered deviant from the institutional norms of the Chinese state bureaucracy. This study seeks to answer the following question: When individual beliefs and actions are deeply embedded in their institutional context, as in the case of Chinese executives in overseas-listed firms, who is likely to break with the institutional status quo, and what are their reasons for doing so? Contrary to the existing status-based theory of social deviance, institutional disengagement among Chinese executives often takes place in the middle of an institutional status hierarchy. Characteristics of the institutional environment and the individual biography further interact with individual positions to affect the likelihood that an executive will diverge from the institutional expectation of not exercising stock options. The second study investigates the individual consequences of stock option exercises in Chinese state-owned firms. This study seeks to answer the following questions: When institutional entrepreneurs diverge from the institutional status quo, who is most likely to be punished? Who can bypass the sanction, and for what reasons? The findings suggest that executives were more likely to be punished for divergent behaviors if (a) the executive had low levels of bottom-up power, (b) the prevalence of divergent behaviors among peers was moderate without having reached a threshold that sufficiently legitimized the practice, and (c) the broader audience was concentrated. This study promises to shed new light on the outcomes of institutional entrepreneurship by addressing why some institutional entrepreneurs fail. The third study, explores the spread of stock backdating, an unethical corporate practice about which public information was virtually unavailable until 2005. This "invisible" practice, unlike corporate practices accessible to outsiders, did not diffuse through board interlocks. Rather, stock option backdating spread because of geographic proximity: Firms were more likely to backdate stock options to the extent that other firms located geographically close to them had done so. The effect of geographical proximity was conditional on high levels of local board interlocks, a finding that lends support to the idea of the importance of localized interactions among members of the local business elite. Together these findings suggest that invisible corporate practices follow unique diffusion patterns.

Download or read book Three Essays Inferring Prospective and Retrospective Information Based on Options Trading Activities and a New Theoretical Approach on Multivariate Subordination of L vy Processes written by Remo Crameri and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Accounting written by Mingshan Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: