Prices of currency options commonly differ from the Black-Scholes formula along two dimensions: implied volatilities vary by strike price (volatility smiles) and maturity (implied volatility of at­the­money options increases, on average, with maturity). We account for both using Gram­Charlier...

We document a surprising pattern in market prices of S&P 500 index options. When implied volatilities are graphed against a standard measure of moneyness, the implied volatility smirk does not flatten out as maturity increases up to the observable horizon of two years. This behavior contrasts...

From the CAC40 French stock index, we induce the implied market factor’s level through the inversion of a closed form pricing formula for European calls on the CAC40. For this purpose, we assume that the CAC40 index is a disturbed observation of the actual market factor, the market factor’s...

The distributional form of financial asset returns has important implications for the theoretical and empirical analyses in economics and finance. It is now a well-established fact that financial return distributions are empirically nonstationary, both in the weak and the strong sense. One first...

This paper studies the effect of stock options expiration day on the underlying shares traded on the National Stock Exchange (NSE). Overall we tested for abnormal trading volume, abnormal price movement, individual stock reversal and stock pinning on expiration days. To the best of our...

The Value-at-Risk (VAR) measure is based on only the second moment of a rates of return distribution. It is an insufficient risk performance measure, since it ignores both the higher moments of the pricing distributions, like skewness and kurtosis, and all the fractional moments resulting from...

Portfolio diversification may not always lower the portfolio risk, but may actually increase it. It depends on the long memory and distributional stability characteristics of the underlying rates of return. This disturbing result is based on the theoretical Fama- Samuelson proposition of...

We propose and empirically study a pricing model for convertible bonds based on Monte Carlo simulation. The method uses parametric representations of the early exercise decisions and consists of two stages. Pricing convertible bonds with the proposed Monte Carlo approach allows us to better...

This paper investigates the joint hypothesis of market efficiency and unbiasedness of futures prices for the FTSE-20 blue chip index futures contract. The FTSE/ATHENS STOCK EXCHANGE (ASE)-20 futures market is the first organized derivatives market established in Greece and its operation rests...

The FTSE/ASE-20 futures market, as the first organised Greek derivatives market, established in August 1999 and its operation rests with the Athens Derivatives Exchange (ADEX) and the Athens Derivatives Exchange Clearing House (ADECH). Cointegration tests are used and an error correction model...