We examine derivatives trading prior to takeover rumors in a sample of 1,638 publicly traded U.S. firms. The volume of options traded is abnormally high over the 5-day pre-rumor period, primarily due to the number of out-of-the-money call options traded. In addition, the direction of option...

This paper estimates to what extent proxy advice allows funds to vote as if they were informed. A fund’s vote is classified as “informed“ if the fund accessed the company’s proxy statement from the SEC’s Edgar website prior to voting. A fund’s proxy advisor, if any, is identified...

Khan and Watts (2009) develop a firm-year measure of conditional conservatism, labeled C_Score, that builds on the Basu (1997) asymmetric timeliness (AT) measure. However, recent research documents an asymmetric relation between lagged earnings and current returns, indicative of bias in the Basu...

We provide an easy-to-use model that values derivatives for a privately informed agent. We introduce private forward prices that conveniently format private information for inclusion in a standard no-arbitrage framework. This framework yields simple expressions for the privately-informed value...

We find that weekend, holiday and overnight trading breaks generate excessive perceived risk in the option markets, presumably due to asymmetric information, which, in turn, encourages uninformed option traders to postpone trading. This perceived risk subsides after two days accompanied by an...

This paper introduces a new model-free approach to measuring the expectation of market variance using VIX derivatives. This approach shows that VIX derivatives carry different information about future variance than S&P 500 (SPX) options, especially during the 2008 financial crisis. I find that...