Essays on Inference from Option Markets

Essays on Inference from Option Markets
Author: Asad Dossani
Publisher:
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of three chapters that analyze the economic information contained in option markets. Option markets are forward looking, and thus contain valuable insight into the beliefs of financial market participants. They can be used to study risk premia and to make forecasts. The Chapter 1, Central Bank Tone and Currency Risk Premia, asks how the tone of central bank press conferences impacts risk premia in the currency market. First, I find that option implied risk aversion increases when central banks are hawkish, and decreases when central banks are dovish. Second, I find that hawkish central bank tone predicts higher future variance risk premia, and vice versa. One explanation for this result is that the tone of a press conference indicates to investors the likelihood of central bank intervention, conditional on the state of the economy. Chapter 2, Monetary Stimulus and Perception of Risk, investigates the relationship between monetary stimulus and the perception of risk in financial markets, and how this varies across asset classes. First, I document a positive relationship between monetary stimulus and the perception of risk in equity, commodity, and currency markets. I document a negative relationship between monetary stimulus and the perception of risk in bond markets. Second, I establish a cointegrating relationship between monetary stimulus and implied volatility, indicating a positive long run equilibrium relationship in the levels of monetary stimulus and implied volatility. This relationship is present across asset classes. Third, I document the link between monetary stimulus and expected inflation, a possible mechanism by which monetary stimulus affects the perception of risk across financial markets. Chapter 3, Option Augmented Density Forecasts of Market Return with Monotone Pricing Kernel, considers consider an option augmented density forecast of the market return obtained by transforming a baseline density forecast estimated from past excess returns so as to monotonize its ratio with a risk neutral density estimated from current option prices. We find that monotonizing the pricing kernel leads to a modest improvement in the calibration of density forecasts.

Identification and Inference for Econometric Models

Identification and Inference for Econometric Models
Author: Donald W. K. Andrews
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 606
Release: 2005-06-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521844413

This 2005 collection pushed forward the research frontier in four areas of theoretical econometrics.

Essays on Information in Options Markets

Essays on Information in Options Markets
Author: Mr. Travis Lake Johnson
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN:

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.

Essays on Option Market Information Content, Market Segmentation and Fear

Essays on Option Market Information Content, Market Segmentation and Fear
Author: Mishuk Anwar Chowdhury
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2012
Genre: Fear
ISBN:

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.

Essays on the Interaction of Option and Equity Markets

Essays on the Interaction of Option and Equity Markets
Author: Alexander Feser
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

How do option and equity markets interact with each other? This is the central question that is answered from three different angles in this dissertation. The first Chapter discusses how option-implied information is incorporated into equity markets. Based on a novel rescaled option-implied Value-at-Risk (rVaR) measure, it is shown that option-implied information is priced differently depending on whether it is based on options with strikes close to the current price of the underlying or far-out-of-the-money options. The findings provide novel insights in the joint interaction between option and equity markets and help to explain contradictory results in previous studies. The second chapter provides an in-depth analysis of how to estimate risk-neutral moments robustly. A simulation and an empirical study show that estimating risk-neutral moments presents a trade-off between (1) the bias of estimates caused by a limited strike price domain and (2) the variance of estimates induced by micro-structural noise. The best trade-off is offered by option-implied quantile moments estimated from a volatility surface interpolated with a local-linear kernel regression and extrapolated linearly. The third chapter expands volatility targeting to option strategies. The chapter shows that option trading strategies can be managed by increasing exposure if volatility is low and reducing exposure if volatility is high to achieve a constant risk exposure over time. These volatility controlled option strategies generate economically and statistically significant alphas over their unmanaged counterparts, have reduced maximum drawdowns, lower downside risk, and more normal return distributions.