U.S. exchange-traded stock options are exercisable before expiration. While put options should frequently be exercised early to earn interest, they are not. In this paper, we explain an early exercise decision rule and then examine actual exercise behavior during the period January 1996 through...

We develop a conditional capital asset pricing model in continuous-time that allows for stochastic beta exposure. When beta co-moves with market variance and the stochastic discount factor (SDF), beta risk is priced, and the expected return on a stock deviates from the security market line. The...

Spreads of agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) vary significantly in the cross section and over time, but the sources of this variation are not well understood. We document that, in the cross section, MBS spreads adjusted for the prepayment option show a pronounced smile with respect to the...

We document that properly scaled deviations from put-call parity estimate the contribution of market frictions to expected returns (CFER) accurately, by means of a non-parametric theoretically founded identification strategy. The required conditions are that our estimator predicts the underlying...

Numerous studies find S-shaped pricing kernels, which is conflicting with standard theory. In contrast to that, based on a novel GARCH model with structural breaks, I show that the pricing kernel is consistently U-shaped. The results are robust to variations in the methodology and hold for...

We model the S&P500 index options dynamics using the CGMY distribution, with independent "up" and "down" return jumps, and diffusive jump intensities. Allowing the up and down parts to be separately parameterised accounts for the dynamic smirk effect, without correlation between returns and...

Term premiums, defined as the excess return of long-dated contracts over short-dated contracts, in commodity futures are strongly predictable, both in the time series and in the cross section, by roll yield spreads. Strategies that exploit this predictability show sizable Sharpe ratios and are...

I study a novel data set of short-term dividend futures contracts for individual stocks. I combine this data with dividend forecasts from equity research analysts to construct a model-free measure of short-term equity risk premia. I provide the first description of the cross-section of risk...

When the pricing kernel is U-shaped, then expected returns of claims with payout on the upside are negative for strikes beyond a threshold, determined by the slope of the U-shaped kernel in its increasing region, and have negative partial derivative with respect to strike in the increasing...