Under the common assumption of constant interest rates, we show that penalties for early termination of a lease are often structured in such a way that the cancellation option embedded in consumer automotive leases has little value. Furthermore, our estimates drawn from a sample of three popular car models over 1990 to 2000 indicate that the stand-alone value of the lease-end purchase option is…
Growing evidence suggests that extraordinary average returns may be obtained by trading equity index options, and that at least part of this abnormal performance is attributable to volatility and jump risk premia. This paper asks whether such priced risk factors are alone sufficient to explain these average returns. To provide an answer in as general as possible a setting, I estimate a flexible…
Many believe that a bubble existed in Internet stocks in the 1999 to 2000 period, and that short-sale restrictions prevented rational investors from driving Internet stock prices to reasonable levels. In the presence of such short-sale constraints, option and stock prices could decouple during a bubble. Using intraday options data from the peak of the Internet bubble, we find almost no evidence…