In this study, we investigate how useful the information content of out-of-the-money S&P 500 index call options is to predict the size and direction of the underlying index for the period 2004-2013. First, we demonstrate that behavior of the right tail of the option implied risk-neutral...

Under very general conditions, the total quadratic variation of a jump-diffusion process can be decomposed into diffusive volatility and squared jump variation. We use this result to develop a new option valuation model in which the underlying asset price exhibits volatility and jump intensity...

Plain vanilla options have a single underlying asset and a single condition on the payoff at the expiration date. For this class of options, a well-known result of Duffie, Pan and Singleton (2000) shows how to invert the characteristic function to obtain a closed-form formula for their prices....

Many studies have documented that daily realized volatility estimates based on intraday returns provide volatility forecasts that are superior to forecasts constructed from daily returns only. We investigate whether these forecasting improvements translate into economic value added. To do so we...

Plain vanilla options have a single underlying asset and a single condition on the payoff at the expiration date. For this class of options, a well-known result of Duffie, Pan and Singleton (2000) shows how to invert the characteristic function to obtain a closed-form formula for their prices....

In this paper, we present a novel method to extract the risk-neutral probability of default of a from from American put option prices. Building on the idea of a default corridor proposed in Carr and Wu (2011), we derive a parsimonious closed-form formula for American put option price from which...

There is a close link between prices of equity options and the probability of default of a firm. We show that in the presence of positive expected equity recovery, the standard methods that assume zero equity recovery at default misestimate the probability of default implicit in option prices....

The traditional derivation of risk-neutral probability in the binomial option pricing framework used in introductory mathematical finance courses is straightforward, but employs several different concepts and is is not algebraically simple. In order to overcome this drawback of the standard...

This paper provides a novel methodology for estimating option pricing models based on risk-neutral moments. We synthesize the distribution extracted from a panel of option prices and exploit linear relationships between risk-neutral cumulants and latent factors within the continuous time affine...

Advances in variance analysis permit the splitting of the total quadratic variation of a jump-diffusion process into upside and downside components. Recent studies establish that this decomposition enhances volatility predictions, and highlight the upside/downside variance spread as a driver of...