What Type of Process Underlies Options? A Simple Robust Test

Peter Carr and Liuren Wu

Finance from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We develop a simple robust test for the presence of continuous and discontinuous (jump) com­ponents in the price of an asset underlying an option. Our test examines the prices of at­the­money and out­of­the­money options as the option maturity approaches zero. We show that these prices converge to zero at speeds which depend upon whether the sample path of the underlying asset price process is purely continuous, purely discontinuous, or a mixture of both. By applying the test to S&P 500 index options data, we conclude that the sample path behavior of this index contains both a continuous component and a jump component. In particular, we find that while the pres­ence of the jump component varies strongly over time, the presence of the continuous component is constantly felt. We investigate the implications of the evidence for parametric model specifications.

Keywords: Jumps; continuous martingale; option pricing; Levy density; double tails; local time. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C52 G12 G13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2002-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ets and nep-fmk
Note: Type of Document - pdf; prepared on LaTex; to print on postscript; pages: 41 ; figures: included. prepared via dvipdfm
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpfi:0207019

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