Disaggregating marketplace attitudes toward risk : a contingent-claim-based model

With a view to providing economic interpretations of temporal changes in Risk-Neutral Probability Distributions (RNPDs), this article estimates RNPDs from option prices, then studies the expected excess returns on a fixed-strategy reference portfolio constructed from RNPD-defined contingent claims. It disaggregates the reference portfolio into an investment, an insurance and a certainty component, each containing one type of contingent claim (having positive, negative or zero expected excess return, respectively). The disaggregation provides a convenient way of operationalizing Markowitz's semi-variance measures, one for upside potential and one for downside risk. Our empirical tests show that the pricing of investment-oriented claims is related to both S&P index growth and volatility, but the pricing of insurance-oriented claims is related only to index volatility. Moreover, the relative importance of insurance earnings to total earnings appears principally to be related to volatility. Thus our analyses show that investment and insurance claims are priced differently in the marketplace, and the different pricing effects can be identified by disaggregating the reference portfolio returns.