Security prices contain valuable information that can be used to make a wide variety of economic decisions. To extract this information, a model is required that relates market prices to the desired information, and that ideally can be implemented using timely and low-cost methods. The authors...

American call and put options on the S&P 500 index futures that violate the stochastic dominance bounds of Constantinides and Perrakis (2007) over 1983-2006 are identified as potentially profitable investment opportunities. Call bid prices more frequently violate their upper bound than put bid...

We develop statistical methods to detect informed trading in options markets. We apply these methods to 31 companies from various sectors over 14 years analyzing approximately 9.6 million option prices. We find that option informed trading tends to cluster prior to certain events, takes place...

This appendix extends the empirical results in Chesney, Crameri, and Mancini (2011). Informed trading activities on put and call options are analyzed for 19 companies in the banking and insurance sectors from January 1996 to September 2009. Our empirical findings suggest that certain events such...

We document widespread violations of stochastic dominance in the one-month S&P 500 index options market over the period 1986-2002. These violations imply that a trader can improve her expected utility by engaging in a zero-net-cost trade. We allow the market to be incomplete and also imperfect...

We examine stock return predictability of "Out-of-The-Money (OTM) put-to-OTM call trading volume ratio" (OTMPC). Our numerical analysis predicts that informed investors hardly write OTM options because the leverage effect is not sufficient to compensate for transaction costs. OTMPC, thus,...

The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

This paper reviews recent developments in macro and finance on the relationship between financial risk and the real economy. We focus on three specific topics: the term structure of uncertainty, time variation - and specifically the long-term decline - in the variance risk premium, and time...