The Securities and Exchange Commission's September 2008 emergency order introduced a near complete shorting ban of some 800 financials traded in the US. This paper provides an empirical analysis of the equity options market during the three months that include the duration of the ban. Using...

Inspired by Aumann and Serrano (2008) and Foster and Hart (2009), we propose risk-neutral options' implied measures of riskiness and investigate their significance in predicting the cross section of expected returns per unit of risk. The empirical analyses indicate a negative and significant...

Option volatilities have significant predictive power for the cross section of stock returns and vice versa. Stocks with large increases in call implied volatilities tend to rise over the following month whereas increases in put implied volatilities forecast future decreases in next-month stock...