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This paper investigates the information content of implied volatilities inferred from individual stock options quoted over-the-counter (OTC). First, we examine whether the implied volatility has better explanatory power than historical volatility for forecasting future realized volatility of the underlying stock return. Next, we analyze the properties of volatility spreads, the difference between implied volatilities and realized volatilities. Using near-the-money options for 10 firms over the sample period from April 2005 to April 2010, we first demonstrate that the implied volatilities for most firms don’t have additional information beyond what are already contained in historical volatilities. However, the implied volatilities with some specific remaining maturities for two firms dominate historical volatilities in explaining the future realized volatilities. Second, we find that during the period before global financial crisis, the implied volatilities are systematically lower than the future realized volatilities whereas this reversal disappears after the year 2008. This finding suggests that there’s a possibility of the risk loving behavior of the investors in OTC individual stock options market during the pre-global crisis period. Finally, through the comparative analysis of the KOSPI200 index options quoted OTC over the same sample period, we conclude that the OTC individual stock options market has distinctive characteristics like the KRW/USD OTC currency options market.

This paper investigates whether equity liquidity and stock return jump are important determinants for the Korean corporate CDS spreads. The previous studies mainly have examined the determinants of CDS spread time series levels, whereas this study focuses on the determinants of changes or differences of CDS spread time series as well as the effecting factors of cross-sectional variations. Using monthly averaged CDS quotes for 29 firms from Jan. 2005 to Nov. 2012, we first demonstrate that the explanatory power for CDS spread changes is improved to about 39% by adding both credit risk-related market variables and firm-level jump variables, contrary to the low explanatory power (approximately 21%) reported by the previous study. However, since the principle component analysis for residuals from the regression shows that a common risk factor exists, it is possible that additional important factor remains. In addition, we demonstrate that stock return volatility is a robust variable to explain the cross-sectional differences in CDS spreads. We also find that the equity liquidity is a robust and significant factor for the cross-sectional differences in CDS spreads after the global financial crisis period. The result implies that, after the recent crisis, investors more actively considered equity illiquidity costs when they hedged their CDS exposures by stocks.

This study examines the model regarding the relation between the expected returns of defaultable asset and default risk factors utilizing CDS (credit default swap). While the previous study estimates the expected returns of CDS using stock price and accounting data, this study introduces new estimation method using CDS term structure. Two factors incorporating market-wide distress risk and recovery risk are considered as the default risk factors. The results of analyzing the Korean corporate CDS market over the sample period from September 2009 to December 2016 are as follows. First, for the expected returns of CDS, there exists the negative risk premium related to market-wide distress risk covariance. Second, the finding of this negative risk premium is robust even after the market risk factors and liquidity factor are controlled for. Third, the negative premium related to recovery risk is observed but it is not statistically significant. These results imply that the investors consider the market-wide distress risk covariance as the main risk factor when pricing the Korean corporate CDSs and they require the reward taking risk as they invest CDS with the lower distress risk covariance. Therefore, our empirical results support the model that the covariance part between individual firm's distress risk and market-wide default risk changes is not diversifiable and thus the investors require the premium for this non-diversifiable risk.

We provide evidence that current CDS slope negatively predicts future stock returns over several months in the Korean market. The entire sample period covers January 2003 through June 2009. The empirical results are as follows. First, when constructing quartile portfolios based on the slope of CDS spreads, we find that predictive power of CDS slope lasts for seven months. In addition, the lower the CDS slope is, the higher average stock return is. Specifically, a slope-based strategy of buying the lowest slope and selling the highest slope makes profits over 2% each month. The profitability is statistically and economically significant even after controlling for some risk factors. We also find that the results are robust to various sub-samples, portfolio-weighting schemes, as well as the number of sorted portfolios. This abnormal return cannot be explained by standard risk factors, default risk, and expectation hypothesis.

This paper presents a numerical procedure for pricing collateralized bond obligations (CBO) and analyze the impact of default correlations for the prices of collateralized bond obligations. Specifically, we adopt default correlation model of Zhou (2001) and first passage time model of Black and Cox (1976). The model of Black and Cox is used for estimating the value of the firm and the volatility of the firm value which are unobservable variables. We find that the impact of default correlations on the prices of collateralized bond obligations is generally quite large. This can be tested by carrying out Monte-Carlo simulations for firm value processes, assuming first no default correlations and second modeling default correlations between the processes. We also compare the model prices and recently issued CBO market price and find that no default correlation model over prices the issued CBO and default correlation model under prices the issued CBO. These results in this paper emphasize that modeling default correlations is very important in analyzing CBO and a more complicated further analysis is required.

This study analyzes the impact of the information environment (IE) and credit default swap (CDS) transaction costs on information transmission between the stock and CDS markets. Using the daily regression analysis on the Korean firm’s stock and CDS data from 2004 to 2023, the results show that companies with superior IE in the stock market exhibit a larger and more sensitive total information flow from the stock market to the CDS market. Companies with lower transaction costs in the CDS market demonstrate faster information flow. In the case of companies with superior IE, fundamental information is reflected in stock prices with high weight and thus the CDS spreads change reflecting information about stock prices. According to this study’s findings, the primary factor influencing the information flow from the stock market to the CDS market is the information environment of the company in the stock market, rather than transaction costs in the CDS market.

The authors investigate whether the effects of stock buyback announcements on credit default swap (CDS) spread changes for US firms depend on macroeconomic conditions. The authors find that abnormal CDS spreads increase for small-sized firms announced to repurchase a higher share ratio during the normal period. In contrast, abnormal CDS spreads decrease for big-sized firms regardless of the magnitude of the repurchase ratio during the crisis period. The results of this study suggest that the wealth transfer effect dominates the signaling effect for small-sized firms with higher target ratios during the normal period. In contrast, the signaling effect is stronger for bondholders of big-sized firms during the crisis period.

The authors examined whether stocks with higher left-tail risk measures earn higher or lower futures returns. Specifically, the authors estimate the cross-sectional principal component of a battery of left-tail risk measures and analyze future returns on stocks with high principal component values. In contrast to finance theories on the risk–return trade-off relationship, the study results show that high left-tail risk stocks have lower future returns. This finding is robust to various left-tail risk measures and controls for other risk factors. Moreover, the negative relationship between the left-tail risk and returns is more pronounced for stocks that are actively traded by retail investors. This empirical result is consistent with behavioral theory that when investors make decisions based on experience, they tend to underweight the likelihood of rare events.

This study aims to investigate the existence of contagion between liquid and illiquid assets in the credit default swap (CDS) market around the recent financial crisis. The authors perform analyses based on vector autoregression model and the dynamic conditional correlation model. The estimation of vector autoregression models reveals that changes in liquid CDS (LCDS) spreads lead to changes in illiquid CDS spreads at least one week ahead during the financial crisis period, whereas the leading direction is reversed during the post-crisis period. Moreover, the results are robust after controlling for structural variables which are proven as determinants of CDS spreads and are empirically supported. This study interprets that information was incorporated first into the LCDSs because of the flight-to-liquidity during the recent crisis period but there is a default contagion effect by reflecting illiquidity-induced credit risk after the crisis. Finally, the dynamic conditional correlation analysis also confirms the main results.

This paper investigates a retrospective on the Journal of Derivatives and Quantitative Studies (JDQS) on its 30th anniversary based on bibliometric. JDQSs yearly publications, citations, impact factors, and centrality indices grew up in early 2010s, and diminished in 2020. Keyword network analysis reveals the JDQS's main keywords including behavioral finance, implied volatility, information asymmetry, price discovery, KOSPI200 futures, volatility, and KOSPI200 options. Citations of JDQS articles are mainly driven by article age, demeaned age squared, conference, nonacademic authors and language. In comparison between number of views and downloads for JDQS articles, we find that recent changes in publisher and editorial and publishing policies have increased visibility of JDQS.