Due to their short lifespans and migrating moneyness, options are notoriously difficult to study with the factor models commonly used to analyze the risk-return trade-off in other asset classes. Instrumented principal components analysis solves this problem by tracking contracts in terms of...

We develop a novel methodology for extracting information from option implied volatility (IV) surfaces for the cross-section of stock returns, using image recognition techniques from machine learning (ML). The predictive information we identify is essentially uncorrelated with most of the...

We empirically analyze the pricing of political uncertainty, guided by a theoretical model of government policy choice. To isolate political uncertainty, we exploit its variation around national elections and global summits. We find that political uncertainty is priced in the equity option...

Due to their short lifespans and migrating moneyness, options are notoriously difficult to study with the factor models commonly used to analyze the risk-return tradeoff in other asset classes. In-trumented principal components analysis (IPCA) solves this problem by tracking contracts in terms...

We empirically analyze the pricing of political uncertainty, guided by a theoretical model of government policy choice. To isolate political uncertainty, we exploit its variation around national elections and global summits. We find that political uncertainty is priced in the equity option...

A conspicuous amount of aggregate tail risk is missing from the price of financial sector crash insurance during the 2007-2009 crisis. The difference in costs of out-of-the-money put options for individual banks, and puts on the financial sector index, increases fourfold from its pre-crisis...