Interpreting the volatility smile: an examination of the information content of option prices

Steven A. Weinberg

No 706, International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

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: Risk management; Asset-liability management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ets and nep-fmk
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedgif:706

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