The pricing kernel puzzle concerns the locally increasing empirical pricing kernel, which is inconsistent with a risk-averse representative investor in a single period, single state variable setting. Some recent papers worry that the puzzle is caused simply by the mismatch of backward looking...

We estimate short-duration dividend strip prices from 25 years-worth of S&P 500 index option data (1996-2020). We show that short-duration strips offer substantially more attractive returns than does the market, but the measurement error obscures this result at monthly holding periods. For...

We show that S&P 500 futures are pulled towards the at-the-money strike price on days when serial options on the S&P 500 futures expire (pinning), and are pushed away from the cost-of-carry adjusted at-the-money strike price right before the expiration of options on the S&P 500 index...

Constructing portfolios based on second-order stochastic dominance (SSD) is theoretically attractive since all risk-averse investors would prefer a dominating portfolio. However, choosing among SSD efficient portfolios is a challenge without an obvious ranking metric. We explore a particular...

Widespread violations of stochastic dominance by one-month S&P 500 index call options over 1986-2006 imply that a trader can improve expected utility by engaging in a zero-net-cost trade net of transaction costs and bid-ask spread. Although pre-crash option prices conform to the...

We consider the problem of consistently pricing new options given the prices of related options on the same stock. The Black-Scholes formula and standard binomial trees can only accommodate one related European option which then effectively specifies the volatility parameter. Implied binomial...

The central premise of the Black and Scholes [Black, F., Scholes, M. (1973). The pricing of options and corporate liabilities. Journal of Political Economy 81, 637–659] and Merton [Merton, R. (1973). Theory of rational option pricing. Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 4,...

Numerous hedge funds stop reporting to commercial databases each year. An issue for hedgefund performance estimation is: what delisting return to attribute to such funds? This would be particularly problematic if delisting returns are typically very different from continuing funds’ returns. In...