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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether volatility implied from dollar-rupee options is an unbiased and efficient predictor of ex post volatility, and to determine which options market is a better predictor of future realized volatility and to ascertain whether the model-free measure of implied volatility outperforms the traditional measure derived from the Black–Scholes–Merton model.

The information content of exchange-traded implied volatility and that of quoted implied volatility for OTC options is compared with that of historical volatility and a GARCH(1, 1)-based volatility. Ordinary least squares regression is used to examine the unbiasedness and informational efficiency of implied volatility. Robustness of the results is tested by using two specifications of implied volatility and realized volatility and comparison across two markets.

Implied volatility from both OTC and exchange-traded options is found to contain significant information for predicting ex post volatility, but is neither unbiased nor informationally efficient. The implied volatility of at-the-money options derived using the Black–Scholes–Merton model is found to outperform the model-free implied volatility (MFIV) across both markets. MFIV from OTC options is found to be a better predictor of realized volatility than MFIV from exchange-traded options.

This study throws light on the predictive power of currency options in India and has strong practical implications for market practitioners. Efficient currency option markets can serve as effective vehicles both for hedging and speculation and can convey useful information to the regulators regarding the market participants’ expectations of future volatility.

This study is a comprehensive study of the informational efficiency of options on an emerging currency such as the Indian rupee. To the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first studies to compare the predictive ability of the exchange-traded and OTC markets and also to compare traditional model-dependent volatility with MFIV.

More studies have investigated the relation between option measures and stock returns during scheduled corporate events. This study adds to the literature and investigates the informational role of options concerning stock returns following unscheduled corporate news events. The authors focus on individual analysts' recommendation changes rather than consensus revisions, as the recommendation consensus might discard a large amount of potentially valuable information in the aggregation process.

Based on the econometric model, the authors follow Bakshi et al. (2003) to construct the model-free option implied measures. The authors further decompose the implied option variance into upside and downside components. In such a way, the different informational roles of call and put options can be distinguished. A variety of regression analyses are conducted to examine the predictive power of option implied measures, and the ordered probit model is used to test the tipping hypothesis of analyst recommendations.

This study’s results show that the option market impounds the “valuable” firm-specific news; thus, the pre-event option market is strongly related to stock returns around recommendations even though recommendation changes are largely “unscheduled”. At the same time, these results suggest that upside (good) and downside (bad) implied volatilities contain distinctive information on subsequent stock returns.

This study provides new evidence that an increase in upside (downside) volatility around analyst recommendation changes would increase the probability that analysts upgrade (downgrade) the stock. The findings provide implications for investors and risk managers in making investment decisions.

The study examines the mediating role of accounting information quality (AQ), a proxy for firms' information risk, in firms' business strategy and the cost of equity (COE) nexus to highlight how AQ provides a mechanism through which a company's business strategy affects its COE.

The research study utilises data from 12,100 firm-year observations of United States (US) non-financial firms from 2001 to 2017, drawn from multiple databases, and employs the bootstrapping method of mediation analysis to test the indirect effect of AQ on the business strategy–COE relationship. The authors rely on Miles and Snow's two pure business strategy typologies, prospectors and defenders and use innate accrual quality and implied COE models to measure AQ and COE, respectively.

The results suggest that AQ partially mediates the relationship between business strategy and COE. The authors document that while innovative-oriented prospector firms have a lower AQ and a higher implied COE, efficiency-oriented defenders are associated with a higher AQ and lower COE. The higher (lower) COE of prospector (defender) firms is observed to be partly due to their lower (higher) AQ. The results indicate that while the idiosyncratic risk implied in firms' strategic orientation can directly influence their COE, the business strategy implications on firms' COE can be indirect through their AQ, a source of information risk.

Due to data limitation, it was not possible to measure all possible methods of measuring implied COE.

The paper highlights the role of firm's business strategy in pricing decisions by investors.

The paper contributes to the existing literature by providing evidence that AQ, a proxy for information risk, is a mechanism through which business strategy affects firms' COE. The authors thus complement extant literature to empirically test the information risk effect inherent in strategic orientation on security pricing.

This study investigates the impact of uncertainty on the mean-variance relationship. We find that the stock market's expected excess return is positively related to the market's conditional variances and implied variance during low uncertainty periods but unrelated or negatively related to conditional variances and implied variance during high uncertainty periods. Our empirical evidence is consistent with investors' attitudes toward uncertainty and risk, firms' fundamentals and leverage effects varying with uncertainty. Additionally, we discover that the negative relationship between returns and contemporaneous innovations of conditional variance and the positive relationship between returns and contemporaneous innovations of implied variance are significant during low uncertainty periods. Furthermore, our results are robust to changing the base assets to mimic the uncertainty factor and removing the effect of investor sentiment.

This article empirically tests the time-correlation of implied information reflecting the return dynamics of KOSPI 200 markets in the view of the decision making and market efficiency. Because option prices are not perfectly correlated with each other and with the underlying asset, the information contents of the option are different from those of the underlying market price. And, under the non-complete of the market and the limited arbitrage, the information implied in option (underlying) market price may be more useful in the option (underlying) market than in the underlying (option) market.

The estimation results show that the time-correlation of incremental information are existed in performance of out-of-sample pricing and delta hedging conditioned on MR, a result which is not suggestive of the informational efficiency of the KOSPI 200 market. But, the decision marking using the systematic pattern may not be useful due to the option pricing models that allows moments of higher order than two reflecting the source of which the risk-neutrality assumption is strongly rejected by the data.

The purpose of this paper is to understand that option pricing is the response of option implied volatility (IV) to macroeconomic announcements.

The authors use high-frequency data on ASX SPI 200 index options to examine the response of option IV, as well as higher moments of the underlying return distribution, to macroeconomic announcements. Additionally, the authors identify the response of the moments as a function of moneyness of the options.

The findings suggest that in-the-money and out-of-the money options have difference characteristics in their responses, leading to the conclusion that heterogeneity in investor beliefs and preferences affect option IV through the state price density (SPD) function.

The research contributes to the literature that examines whether IV captures the beliefs of market participants about the likelihood of future states together with the preferences of market participants towards these states. In particular, the authors relate changes in option IV to changes in macroeconomic announcements, through the impact of these announcements on the moments of the SPD function.

Market volatility is subject to good or bad news and even responses to fake news and policy changes. In this piece of work, the authors consider the effects of the recent COVID-19 pandemic event on the global equity market, commodities and FX market, measured in terms of the investors' fear index.

In this empirical work, the authors employ time series-based regression models followed by augmented dummy regressions and growth of the COVID-19.

COVID-19-induced investors' fear appears to be higher in the equity segment for the first time since the market crash of 1987 and the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. Furthermore, this disease outbreak shock has been more pronounced in terms of crude oil prices. Besides, a market participant in the commodity and FX market has paid a disproportionate premium to protect such pandemic development. Findings show that Options act as the best hedge against an uncertainty like COVID-19 and that option-based implied volatility is the best measure of investors' fear and market volatility.

This study has practical implications for the financial markets, e.g. (1) Contagious disease outbreak news matters for the equity, commodity, and foreign exchange markets – empirical outcome validates the theory of market efficiency valid for the Options. (2) Option's implied volatility is the best indicator of investor fear measured for the unprecedented economic news. Further implication holds for the policymakers and society, e.g. (1) The unavailability of short-selling could be one plausible reason for increased uncertainty and volatility; hence, policymakers should look upon this issue at the exchange level. (2) Any market needs multiple lines of risk management, effective price discovery and attractive liquidity.

The study is novel in terms of presenting market behavior amid COVID-19 across global equity markets and commodities and FX markets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and test for changes in investor risk aversion and the stochastic discount factor (SDF) using options data on the West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures contract during the 2007-2011 period.

Risk aversion functions and SDFs are estimated using parametric approaches before and after four specific dates of interest. The dates are: the summer 2008 end of the bull market regime; the late 2008 credit freeze trough; the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion; and the Libyan uprising.

Absolute risk aversion functions and SDFs are significantly flatter (less decreasing in wealth) after the end of the bull market and the credit freeze trough. After these two market reversals, oil market participants were less risk-averse for low levels of wealth but more risk-averse for high wealth levels. Oil market investors also increased their valuation of anticipated future wealth in average states of nature relative to very high or very low-asset return states after reversals. The BP explosion and the Libyan uprising led to steeper risk aversion functions (decreasing more rapidly in wealth) and SDF. Oil market investors were more risk-averse for lower future wealth, but less risk-averse for higher future wealth. Oil market investors increased their valuation of anticipated future wealth in extreme states of nature relative to average states of nature after both dates.

Documenting statistically and economically significant changes in oil market investors’ attitude toward risk and inter-temporal appetite for risk in relation to changes in financial and political conditions.

The purpose of this chapter is to suggest a genealogy of the concept of information beyond the 20th century. The chapter discusses how the concept of information culture might provide a way of formulating such a genealogic strategy. The chapter approaches this purpose by providing a general narrative of premodern information cultures, examining works on early-modern scholars and 18th century savants and discussion of what seems to be a Foucauldian rupture in the conceptualization of information in 19th century England. The findings of the chapter are situated in the thinking that a genealogy of information would reveal that information had specific purposes in specific settings.

From the perspective of semiotics, “information” is an ambiguous theoretical concept because the word is used to represent both signifier and signified, both text and content. Using the work of Fernand de Saussure, this paper explores theoretical possibilities that open by virtue of understanding information as sign. Of particular interest is the way semiotics suggests ways to bridge the theoretical gap between information as thing and information as cognitive phenomenon by positing information as a cultural phenomenon.