We empirically analyze the pricing of political uncertainty, guided by a theoretical model of government policy choice. To isolate political uncertainty, we exploit its variation around national elections and global summits. We find that political uncertainty is priced in the equity option...

Widespread violations of stochastic dominance by one-month Samp;P 500 index call options over 1986-2006 imply that a trader can improve expected utility by engaging in a zero-net-cost trade net of transaction costs and bid-ask spread. Although pre-crash option prices conform to the...

We model the demand-pressure effect on prices when options cannot be perfectly hedged. The model shows that demand pressure in one option contract increases its price by an amount proportional to the variance of the unhedgeable part of the option. Similarly, the demand pressure increases the...

This study empirically investigates the value employees place on stock options using information from the option exercise behavior of individuals. Employees hold options for another period if the value from holding them and reserving the right to exercise them later is higher than the value of...

By applying stochastic dominance arguments, upper bounds on the reservation write price of European calls and puts and lower bounds on the reservation purchase price of these derivatives are derived in the presence of proportional transaction costs incurred in trading the underlying security....

This paper develops a model for valuing options on a currency which is maintained within a band. The starting point of our model is the well known Krugman model for exchange-rate behavior within a target zone. Results from model runs provide insight into evidence reported by other authors of...

In pricing primary-market options and in making secondary markets, financial intermediaries depend on the quality of forecasts of the variance of the underlying assets. Hence, the gain from improved pricing of options would be a measure of the value of a forecast of underlying asset returns....

The well-known option pricing formula of Black and Scholes depends upon the assumption that price fluctuations are log-normal. However, this formula greatly underestimates the value of options with a low probability of being exercised if, as appears to be more nearly the case in most markets,...

Although exercise prices for executive stock options can be set either below or above the grant-date market price, in practice virtually all options are granted at the money. We offer an economic rationale for this apparent puzzle, by showing that pay-to-performance incentives for risk-averse...

Implicit in the prices of traded financial assets are Arrow- Debreu state prices or, in the continuous-state case, the state-price density (SPD). We construct an estimator for the SPD implicit in option prices and derive an asymptotic sampling theory for this estimator to gauge its accuracy. The...