Foreign exchange operates as a two-tiered over-the-counter (OTC) market dominatedby large, strategic dealers. Using proprietary high frequency data on quotesby the largest foreign exchange dealer banks in the dealer-to-customer (D2C) market,we find a significant heterogeneity in their behavior....

Classical option pricing theories are usually built on the law of one price, neglecting the impact of market liquidity that may contribute to significant bid-ask spreads. Within the framework of conic finance, we develop a stochastic liquidity model, extending the discrete-time constant...

Traditional liquidity measures can provide a false impression of the liquidity and stability of financial market trading. Using data on auctions (bids wanted in competition; BWICs) from the collateralized loan obligation (CLO) market, we show that a standard measure of liquidity, the effective...

We develop a general equilibrium model with intermediaries at the heart of international financial markets. Global intermediaries bargain with households and extract rents for providing access to foreign claims. The behavior of intermediaries, by tilting state prices, breaks monetary neutrality...

We show how distributions can be reduced to low-dimensional scenario trees. Applied to intertemporal distributions, the scenarios and their probabilities become time-varying factors. From S&P 500 options, two or three time-varying scenarios suffice to forecast returns, implied variance or...

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...

On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced a largely unexpected domination plan for Volkswagen. The resulting short squeeze in Volkswagen's stock briefly made it the most valuable listed company in the world. We argue that this was a manipulation designed to save Porsche from insolvency and the...

We find that single-name options trading increases the absolute level of information content of prices (stock price informativeness). We confirm our results through instrumental variable approach to control for potential endogeneity. We further show causality by using a difference-in-difference...