We consider a market where traders have asymmetric information regarding the distribution of asset return and study price discovery of derivatives. The informed trader has private information regarding arbitrary higher moments of asset return, such as volatility or skewness, and exploits her...

The Capital Assistance Program (CAP) was created by the U.S. government in February 2009 to provide backup capital to large financial institutions unable to raise sufficient capital from private investors. Under the terms of the CAP, a participating bank receives contingent capital by issuing...

We analyze the impact of funding costs and margin requirements on prices of index options traded on the CBOE. We propose a model that gives upper and lower bounds for option prices in the absence of arbitrage in an incomplete market with differential borrowing and lending rates. We show that...

We analyze American put options in a hyper-exponential jump-diffusion model. Our contribution is threefold. Firstly, by following a maturity randomization approach, we solve the partial integro-differential equation and obtain a tight lower bound for the American option price. Secondly, our...

We provide a new method to derive the state price density per unit probability based on option prices and GARCH model. We derive the risk neutral distribution using the result in Breeden and Litzenberger (1978) and the historical density adapting the GARCH model of Barone-Adesi, Engle, and...

We develop statistical methods to detect informed trading in options markets. We apply these methods to 31 companies from various sectors over 14 years analyzing approximately 9.6 million option prices. We find that option informed trading tends to cluster prior to certain events, takes place...

This appendix extends the empirical results in Chesney, Crameri, and Mancini (2011). Informed trading activities on put and call options are analyzed for 19 companies in the banking and insurance sectors from January 1996 to September 2009. Our empirical findings suggest that certain events such...

Supported by empirical examples, this paper provides a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set for the estimation of the empirical pricing kernel and, more in general, for the validity of the fundamental theorems of asset pricing. While inferring the...

We propose a nonparametric Bayesian approach for the estimation of the pricing kernel. Historical stock returns and option market data are combined through the Dirichlet Process (DP) to construct an option-adjusted physical measure. The precision parameter of the DP process is calibrated to the...

We show that options written on stocks with low prices are over-priced. This effect is robust to a variety of tests, controlling for common stock- and option- risk characteristics, and to reasonable transaction costs. Natural experiments corroborate this finding; options tend to become...