The structure of a firm-commitment Seasoned Equity Offering (SEO) resembles a put option underwritten by an investment bank syndicate. Employing implied volatilities from issuers' stock options as a direct forward-looking measure, this paper examines the impact of expected price risk on the...

Prior literature shows that the implied volatility spread between call and put options is a bullish signal for future returns on the underlying stocks. A common interpretation is that a high call-put implied volatility spread indicates favorable private information revealed by informed option...

Equity option markets exhibit intense trading activity. We use the variability of option implied volatility spread as a proxy for the impounding of new information, and changes in the interpretation of existing information, into option prices. Over the 2006 – 2016 period, we find that the...

Behavioral theories contend that the human decision-making process tends to both incorporate anchor points and improperly weight low probability events. In this study, we find evidence that equity option market investors anchor to prices and incorporate a probability weighting function similar...