We investigate the association of various firm-specific and market-wide factors with the riskneutral skewness (RNS) implied by the prices of individual stock options. Our analysis covers 149 U.S. firms over a four-year period. Our choice of firms is based on adequate liquidity and trading...

The volatility information content of stock options for individual firms is measured using option prices for 149 U.S. firms and the S&P 100 index. ARCH and regression models are used to compare volatility forecasts defined by historical stock returns, at-the-money implied volatilities and...

Previous papers that test whether sentiment is useful for predicting volatility ignore whether lagged returns information might also be useful for this purpose. By doing so, these papers potentially overestimate the role of sentiment in predicting volatility. In this paper we test whether...

We use, for the first time, a time-varying copula model to investigate the impact of the introduction of the Euro on the dependence between seventeen European stock markets during the period 1994-2003. The model is implemented with a GJR-GARCH-t model for the marginal distributions and the...

The theoretical relationship between the risk-neutral density (RND) of the euro/pound cross-rate and the bivariate RND of the dollar/euro and the dollar/pound rates is derived; the required bivariate RND is defined by the dollar-rate marginal RNDs and a copula function. The cross-rate RND can be...

A time-varying copula model is used to investigate the impact of the introduction of the Euro on the dependence between seventeen European stock markets during the period 1994-2003. The model is implemented with a GJR-GARCH-MA-t model for the marginal distributions and the Gaussian copula for...

We use a time-varying copula model to investigate the impact of the introduction of the Euro on the dependence between seventeen European stock markets during the period 1994-2003. The model is implemented with a GJR-GARCH-t model for the marginal distributions and the Gaussian copula for the...

We investigate why spreads on corporate bonds are so much larger than expected losses from default. Systematic factors make very little contribution to spreads, even if higher moments or downside effects are taken into account. Instead we find that sizes of spreads are strongly related to...

Dichev (2007, American Economic Review), in an influential paper, examines the gap between the performance of major stock markets and the dollar-weighted performance of investors in these markets. He finds a significant gap of 1.3 percent per year for NYSE/AMEX and 1.5 percent internationally....

Existing work on mutual fund performance persistence has obtained diverse results, depending on the group of funds studied. We examine whether performance persistence within a peer group of competing mutual funds depends on the group's composition. The UK mutual fund industry is ideal for such...