Numerous articles over the past few decades have documented a consistent relationship between earnings surprises and subsequent stock price performance. [See, for example, Ball and Brown (1968), Rendleman, Jones, and Latane (1982), Foster, Olsen, and Shevlin (1984), and Bernard and Thomas...

This paper addresses the issue of whether investors produce more information on firms that have listed stock options than on similar firms that do not have options and, if so, whether this additional information translates into a smaller stock-price reaction to releases of public information...

Assuming a symmetric relation between returns and innovations in implied market volatility, Ang, A., Hodrick, R., Xing, Y., and Zhang, X. (2006) find that sensitivities to changes in implied market volatility have a cross‐sectional effect on firm returns. Dennis, P., Mayhew, S., and Stivers,...

Current literature is inconclusive as to whether idiosyncratic risk influences future stock returns and the direction of the impact. Earlier studies are based on historical realized volatility. Implied volatilities from option prices represent the market's assessment of future risk and are...

Since the 1987 crash, option prices have exhibited a strong negative skew, implying higher implied volatility for out‐of‐the‐money puts than at‐ and in‐the‐money puts. This has resulted in incorporating multiple jumps and stochastic volatility within the data generating process to...

Using the risk-neutral volatility and skewness computed from options on the S&P500, we show there is an asymmetric contemporaneous relation between stock returns and changes in implied market volatility and skewness. Changes in expected market volatility and skewness are cross-sectionally priced...

Assuming a symmetric relation between returns and innovations in implied market volatility, Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006) find that sensitivities to changes in implied market volatility have a cross-sectional effect on firm returns. Dennis, Mayhew, and Stivers (2006), however, find an...

We analyze the changes in cash holding policies of S&P 500 firms before and after their inclusion in the index. One year after inclusion, the mean industry-adjusted cash holdings of these firms decline by nearly 32% from the year before inclusion. Several factors explain this decline. The...

Insurers in the U.S. hold over $5 trillion in assets, with approximately $1 trillion of these assets held in equities. While insurers manage underwriting risk with reinsurance, insurers increasingly manage asset risk with options, futures, and other derivatives. We demonstrate, using all options...

Exchange traded funds (ETFs) mirror an existing index by holding the same component stocks and matching the weighting scheme. ETFs offer services and investment flexibility that indexed mutual funds generally do not. We expect that if ETFs offer additional benefits over index funds, such as...