Using novel data from executive deferred compensation, this paper presents new evidence on the relationship between CEO risk preference and firm risk (the volatility of firm performance measures such as stock return, earnings and operating cash flows). My results show a negative association...

Employee stock options (ESOs) are American-style call options that can be terminated early due to employment shock. This paper studies an ESO valuation framework that accounts for job termination risk and jumps in the company stock price. Under general Levy stock price dynamics, we show that a...

This paper examines the relation between firm-level implied volatility skew and the likelihood of extreme negative events, or crash risk. I show that volatility skew identifies which firms are likely to experience crashes, but only in short-window earnings announcement periods. The predictive...

We examine the association between accounting quality, which is used as a proxy for firm information risk, and the behavior of the term structure of implied option volatility around earnings announcements. By employing a large sample of US firms having options traded on their equity during...

We test the proposition in Johnstone (2016) that new information may lead to higher, rather than lower, uncertainty about firms' future payoffs. Based on the Bayesian rule, we hypothesize earnings news that is inconsistent with investors' prior belief will lead to higher market uncertainty....

We examine whether there is intra-industry information transfer with respect to the second moment of returns around earnings announcements. Using implied volatility from option prices to proxy for uncertainty about firm fundamentals, we find a significantly positive association between changes...

The paper explains why firms with high dispersion of analyst forecasts earn low future returns. These firms beat the CAPM in periods of increasing aggregate volatility and thereby provide a hedge against aggregate volatility risk. The aggregate volatility risk factor can explain the abnormal...

We provide evidence that an option implied volatility-based measure predicts future absolute excess returns of the underlying stock around earnings announcements and annual meetings of shareholders, even after controlling for the realized stock return volatility shortly before these information...

We examine the impact of accounting quality, used as a proxy for information risk, on the behavior of equity implied volatility around quarterly earnings announcements. Using US data during 1996-2010, we observe that lower (higher) accounting quality significantly relates to higher (lower)...

This paper examines whether financial statement information can predict future realized volatility incremental to the volatility implied by option market prices. Prior research establishes that option-implied volatility is a biased estimator of future realized volatility. I use an analytical...