Interpreting the Volatility Smile: An Examination of the Information Content of Option Prices

45 Pages Posted: 22 Aug 2001

See all articles by Steven Aric Weinberg

Steven Aric Weinberg

Government of the United States of America - Financial Markets Section

Date Written: August 2001

Abstract

This paper evaluates how useful the information contained in options prices is for predicting future price movements of the underlying assets. We develop an improved semiparametric methodology for estimating risk-neutral probability density functions (PDFs), which allows for skewness and intertemporal variation in higher moments. We use this technique to estimate a daily time series of risk-neutral PDFs spanning the late 1980's through 1999, for S&P 500 futures, U.S. dollar/Japanese yen futures and U.S. dollar/deutsche mark futures, using options on these futures. For the foreign exchange futures, we find little discernable additional information contained in the estimated PDFs beyond the information derived from the Black-Scholes model, a fully parametric specification. For S&P 500 futures, we find that the risk-neutral distribution implied by the volatility smile better fits the realized returns than the Black-Scholes model, although this better overall fit is not exhibited in the second and third moments.

Keywords: Foreign exchange, derivative asset pricing, probability density functions

JEL Classification: F31, G13, G15

Suggested Citation

Weinberg, Steven Aric, Interpreting the Volatility Smile: An Examination of the Information Content of Option Prices (August 2001). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=280834 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.280834

Steven Aric Weinberg (Contact Author)

Government of the United States of America - Financial Markets Section ( email )

United States

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