In this selective literature review, we start by observing that in efficient markets, there is information incorporated in option prices that might help us to design option pricing models. To this end, we review the numerous methods of recovering risk-neutral probability distributions from...

We show that Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 futures are pulled toward 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...

Numerous hedge funds stop reporting each year to commercial data bases, wreaking havoc with analyzing investment strategies which incur the unobserved delisting return. We use estimated portfolio holdings for funds-of-funds to back out estimated hedge-fund delisting returns. For all exiting...

We model a firm's value process controlled by a manager maximizing expected utility from restricted shares and employee stock options. The manager also controls allocation of his outside wealth, which allows partially hedging of his exposure to firm risk. Managerial control increases the...

We document that the leverage-adjusted returns on S&P 500 index call and put portfolios are decreasing in their strike-to-price ratio over 1986-2009, contrary to the prediction of the Black-Scholes-Merton model. We test a large number of plausible factor models in order to learn what drives the...

We document that S&P 500 futures finish in the proximity of the closest strike price more often on days when serial options on S&P 500 futures expire than on other days. The effect is driven by the interplay of market makers' rebalancing of delta hedges due to the time-decay of the hedges as...

The behavior of a hedge-fund manager naturally depends on her compensation scheme, her preferences, and constraints on her risk-taking. We propose a numerical method which can be used to analyze the impact of these influences. The model leads to several interesting and novel results concerning...