This paper provides new empirical evidence for the way in which non-marketability affects asset prices in financial markets. Critically, the results rely on the unique trading friction "T+1" rule in the Chinese A-share market. Consistent with the predictions derived from Longstaff (1995) and...

This paper surveys the theoretical literature investigating the effect of firms' investment flexibility on the cross-section of expected stock returns. Real options analysis derives firms' value-maximizing investment policies as functions of exogenous fundamental drivers of profitability and...

Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility perform poorly relative to low idiosyncratic volatility stocks. We offer a novel explanation of this anomaly based on real options, which is consistent with earlier findings on idiosyncratic volatility (the positive contemporaneous relation between...

Return anomalies are most pronounced among distressed stocks. We attribute this finding to the role of misvaluation and investors' inability to value distressed stocks correctly. We treat distressed stocks as options and construct a valuation model that explicitly takes into account the value of...

We estimate the term structure of the price of variance risk (PVR), which helps distinguish between competing asset-pricing theories. First, we measure the PVR as proportional to the Sharpe ratio of short-term holding returns of delta-neutral index straddles; second, we estimate the PVR in a...

Supported by empirical examples, this paper provides a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set for the estimation of the empirical pricing kernel and, more in general, for the validity of the fundamental theorems of asset pricing. While inferring the...

We provide evidence of a strong effect of the underlying stock's illiquidity on option prices by showing that the average absolute difference between historical and implied volatility increases with stock illiquidity. This pattern translates into significant excess returns of option trading...

This paper presents an option positioning that allows us to infer forward variances from option portfolios. The forward variances we construct from equity index options help to predict (i) growth in measures of real economic activity, (ii) Treasury bill returns, (iii) stock market returns, and...

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...

When the pricing kernel is U-shaped, then expected returns of claims with payout on the upside are negative for strikes beyond a threshold, determined by the slope of the U-shaped kernel in its increasing region, and have negative partial derivative with respect to strike in the increasing...