We show that Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 futures are pulled toward the at-the-money strike price on days when serial options on the S&P 500 futures expire (pinning) and are pushed away from the cost-of-carry adjusted at-the-money strike price right before the expiration of options on the S&P 500...

We construct a panel of S&P 500 index call and put option portfolios, daily adjusted to maintain targeted maturity, moneyness, and unit market beta, and test multi-factor pricing models. The standard linear factor methodology is applicable because the monthly portfolio returns have low skewness...

We examine the use of second-order stochastic dominance as both a way to measure performance and also as a technique for constructing portfolios. Using in-sample data, we construct portfolios such that their second-order stochastic dominance over a typical pension fund benchmark is most...

Numerous hedge funds stop reporting each year to commercial data bases, wreaking havoc with analyzing investment strategies which incur the unobserved delisting return. We use estimated portfolio holdings for funds-of-funds to back out estimated hedge-fund delisting returns. For all exiting...

We document that the leverage-adjusted returns on S&P 500 index call and put portfolios are decreasing in their strike-to-price ratio over 1986-2009, contrary to the prediction of the Black-Scholes-Merton model. We test a large number of plausible factor models in order to learn what drives the...

The interplay of delegated portfolio management and asset management ownership generates a double agency problem that may result on trading to support security prices. We test this hypothesis analyzing the trading patterns of mutual funds affiliated with banks with the stocks of their...

We analyze four centuries of stock prices and dividends in the Dutch, English, and U.S. market. With the exception of the post-1945 period, the dividend-to-price ratio is stationary and predicts returns throughout all four centuries. “Excess volatility” is thus a pervasive feature of...

Fund managers are double agents; they serve both fund investors and owners of management firms. This conflict of interest may result in trading to support securities prices. Tests of this hypothesis in the Spanish mutual fund industry indicate that bank-affiliated mutual funds systematically...

A relationship exists between aggregate risk-neutral and subjective probability distributions and risk aversion functions. Using a variation of the method developed by Jackwerth and Rubinstein (1996), we estimate risk-neutral probabilities reliably from option prices. Subjective probabilities...

Numerous hedge funds stop reporting to commercial databases each year. An issue for hedgefund performance estimation is: what delisting return to attribute to such funds? This would be particularly problematic if delisting returns are typically very different from continuing funds’ returns. In...