This is the first study on the risk-neutral distribution of option returns. We derive solutions for the risk-neutral variance, skewness, and kurtosis of call and put option returns and document several properties of these ex-ante moments. We find that the volatility, skewness, and kurtosis of...

We develop a methodology to decompose the conditional market risk premium and risk premia on higher-order moments of excess market returns into components related to contingent claims on down, up, and moderate market returns. The decompositions do not depend on assumptions about investor...

Inspired by Aumann and Serrano (2008) and Foster and Hart (2009), we propose risk-neutral options' implied measures of riskiness and investigate their significance in predicting the cross section of expected returns per unit of risk. The empirical analyses indicate a negative and significant...

In this paper, we intend to explain an empirical finding that distressed stocks delivered anomalously low returns (Campbell et. al. (2008)). We show that in a model where investors have heterogeneous preferences, the expected return of risky assets depends on idiosyncratic coskewness betas,...

In this paper, I show that the variance of Fama-French factors, the variance of the momentum factor, as well as the correlation between these factors, predict an important fraction of the time-series variation in post-1990 aggregate stock market returns. This predictability is particularly...