Three Essays In Portfolio Choice And Asset Pricing PDF Download

"This thesis consists of three essays that explore alternative approaches to extracting information from option data, and, along somewhat different lines, examine the channels through which liquidity is priced in equity options.The first essay proposes a novel approach to extracting option-implied equity premia, and empirically examines the information content of these risk premia for forecasting the stock market return. Our approach does not require specifying the functional form of the pricing kernel, and does not impose any restrictions on investors' preferences. We only assume the existence of put and call options which complete the market, and show that the implied equity premium can be inferred from expected excess returns on a portfolio of options. An empirical investigation of S&P 500 index options yields the following conclusions: (i) the implied equity premium predicts stock market returns; (ii) the implied equity premium consistently outperforms variables commonly used in the forecasting literature both in- and out-of-sample; (iii) the implied equity premium is positively related to future returns and negatively related to current returns, as theoretically expected.The second essay studies the effect of illiquidity on equity option returns. Illiquidity is well-known to be a significant determinant of stock and bond returns. We are the first to report on illiquidity premia in equity option markets using a large cross-section of firms. An increase in option illiquidity decreases the current option price and predicts higher expected delta-hedged option returns. This effect is statistically and economically significant, and it is consistent with existing evidence that market makers in the equity options market hold net long positions. The illiquidity premium is robust across puts and calls, across maturities and moneyness, as well as across different empirical approaches. It is also robust when controlling for various firm-specific variables including a standard measure of illiquidity of the underlying stock. For long term options, we find evidence of a liquidity risk factor. In the third essay, we demonstrate that in multifactor asset pricing models, prices of risk for factors that are nonlinear functions of the market return can be readily obtained using data on index returns and index options. We apply this general result to the measurement of the conditional price of coskewness and cokurtosis risk. The price of coskewness risk corresponds to the spread between the physical and the risk-neutral second moments, and the price of cokurtosis risk corresponds to the spread between the physical and the risk-neutral third moments. Estimates of these prices of risk have the expected sign, and they lead to reasonable risk premia. An out-of-sample analysis of factor models with coskewness and cokurtosis risk indicates that the new estimates of the price of risk improve the models. performance. The models also robustly outperform competitors such as the CAPM and the Fama-French model." --