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This paper investigates changes in risk-neutral distribution derived from Taiwan stockindex options under different market conditions. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether individual investor sentiment significantly influences the Taiwan option prices.

The authors adopt the optimization method to estimate the risk-neutral distribution from the Taiwan stock index options and use the t-test to examine the difference in risk-neutral skewness, kurtosis, and confidence interval between the pre-crisis and crisis periods. This paper tests the impact of individual investor sentiment on risk-neutral skewness and confidence interval in two sub-periods.

The authors find that errors in individual investors’ expectations significantly influence the Taiwan stock index option prices.

The data concerning the sentiment of speculative institutional investors are incomplete for the Taiwan option market. Therefore, this paper focusses on the analysis of individual investor sentiment. Further research can study the impact of institutional investor sentiment in emerging markets.

The previous literature has suggested that option prices reflect information before the information is revealed in stock prices. Therefore, an important implication is to analyze the information quality revealed in option prices by studying whether the changes in option prices are due to investor sentiment or non-sentiment-related components.

Most of the studies in the literature have focussed on the US option market, and their applicability may vary across different microstructures. This paper shows that the influence of individual investor sentiment in an emerging market is different from that in the US market.

The implementation of credit risk models has largely relied either on the use of historical default dependence, as proxied by the correlation of equity returns, or on risk neutral equicorrelation, as extracted from CDOs. Contrary to both approaches, the purpose of this paper is to infer risk neutral dependence from CDS data, taking counterparty risk into consideration and avoiding equicorrelation. The impact of risk neutral correlation on the fees of some higher dimensional credit derivatives is also explored.

Copula functions are used in order to capture dependency. An application to market data is provided.

Both in the FtD and CDO cases, using (the correct) risk neutral measure instead of equity dependency has the same effect as the adoption of a copula with tail dependency instead of a Gaussian one. This should be important for those who resort to copulas in credit derivative pricing.

As far as is known, several attempts have been made in order to compare the behavior of different copulas in derivative pricing; however, no attempt has been made in order to extract risk neutral dependence without using the equicorrelation assumption. Therefore no attempt has been made to understand which copula features could proxy for risk neutrality, whenever risk neutral dependency cannot be inferred (for instance because CDS involving that name are not actively traded)

The pricing kernel puzzle of Jackwerth (2000) concerns the fact that the empirical pricing kernel implied in S&P 500 index options and index returns is not monotonically decreasing in wealth as standard economic theory would suggest. Thus, those options are currently priced in a way such that any risk-averse investor would increase his/her utility by trading in them. We provide a representative agent model where volatility is a function of a second momentum state variable. This model is capable of generating the empirical patterns in the pricing kernel, albeit only for parameter constellations that are not typically observed in the real world.

In this research, we analyze the impact of catastrophe events on risk-neutral densities which can be implied from European option markets. As catastrophe events we consider the destruction of the nuclear power plant at Fukushima and the downgrading of U.S. sovereign debt in 2011. In an event study, we analyze the impact on European blue chip index options traded at EUREX. We find that after a short adaption period, probability mass of especially risk-neutral density functions derived from long-term options is shifted toward the right side. Thus, very good states of the economy become more expensive indicating higher prices for deep out-of-the-money options. This signifies that there has been speculation on a recovery of the German stock market after the shocks.

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.

This paper investigates the effects of risk neutral distribution (RND) from option prices on the distribution of the underlying asset. More specifically, we focus on the third moment of distribution, called skewness, which contains important information predicting the jumps of stock index. The sample period covers from January 2002 to July 2006 with the closing price returns of KOSPI200 Index and the KOSPI200 options. The skewness of the risk neutral distribution is estimated from non-parametric method of Bakshi et al.(2003) and the parametric method of Corrado and Su (1996). When estimating the skewness of the underlying assets, we employ Chen et al.(2001) model and calculate the historical skewness from the1-month ahead return underlying asset. Using statistical methodology such as VAR (Vector Autoregressive model), Granger causality test, impulse response and variance decomposition model, we examine whether the skewness of the underlying asset responds to the change of the implied RND. Followings are the major findings and implications drawn from the empirical analysis of the Korean options market. First of all, skewness of options estimated from non-parametric method have information contents predicting the third-moment of KOSPI200 index return whereas skewness of options estimated from parametric method does not have any information forecasting the skewness of KOSPI200 index return.

This paper investigates the relative importance of the skewness and kurtosis of the risk neutral distribution for pricing KOSPI200 options. The skewness and kurtosis are estimated from non parametric method of Bakshi, Kapadia, and Madan (2003) and the parametric method of Corrado and Su (1996). We show that the skewness of the risk neutral distribution is more important factor than the kurtosis irrespective of the estimation method, the definition of pricing errors, the moneyness, the type of options and a period of time.

For the KOSPI 200 index options market. we examine the power of influence on pricing options of the skewness and the kurtosis of the risk neutral distribution. We compare the Black and Scholes (1973) model which does not consider the skewness or the kurtosis of the risk neutral distribution with Corrado and sue 1996)’s model which consider both the skewness and the kurtosis and the models which consider only the skewness or the kurtosis.

It is found that Corrado and sue 1996)‘s model which consider both skewness and kurtosis shows the best performance closely followed by the model which consider only the skewness for tile in-sample pricing and the out-of-sample pricing. As a result. it contributes to pricing options to consider both skewness and kurtosis and the skewness is more important factor for pricing options than the kurtosis.