Recent literature documents that the issuance of analyst recommendations tends to coincide with important corporate events, but offers mixed evidence on whether such recommendations have added value. In this paper, we use large discontinuous stock price changes, known as jumps, to proxy for...

We identify a sample of firms with directors employed by institutional investors and examine the effect of a direct channel of institutional monitoring. Using difference-in-differences tests, we find weak evidence that institutional directors have a positive effect on informational efficiency....

One of the contentious issues regarding the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) is whether the abnormal stock return is driven by investors' delayed reaction to earnings information or by unexpected information shocks subsequent to earnings announcement. In this paper, we disentangle...

Horizon-matched historical volatility is commonly used to forecast future volatility for option valuation under the Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 123R. In this paper, we empirically investigate the performance of using historical volatility to forecast long-term stock return...

Under efficient market hypothesis, option-implied forward variance forms a martingale and changes in forward variance follow a random walk. In this paper, we extract forward variance from option prices following a model-free approach and empirically test the random walk hypothesis. Although...

CNBC's “Fast Money” regularly covers unusual option activity and refers to it as “smart money”. We investigate the impact of the CNBC coverage on underlying stock prices and whether investors can profit by following the “smart money”. We document an immediate spike in trading volume...

This paper undertakes a simulation study to investigate (a) the performance of alternative hedging strategies against various derivatives risks and (b) the impact of model misspecification on hedging performance. The hedging strategies considered in this paper include the single-instrument...