We hypothesize that earnings downside risk, capturing the expectation for future downward operating performance, contains distinct information about firm risk and varies with cost of capital in the cross section of firms. Consistent with the validity of the earnings downside risk measure, we...

Using local linear regressions based on Russell index reconstitution, we examine how option price efficiency is affected by stock market indexing. We find that put-call parity deviation, a proxy for options price efficiency, is significantly smaller if a stock is at the top of the Russell 2000...