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TESTING FOR ANTICIPATED CHANGES IN SPOT VOLATILITY AT EVENT TIMES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2023

Viktor Todorov  and
Yang Zhang
Viktor Todorov*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Yang Zhang
Affiliation:
Financial Market Infrastructure Firm
*
Address correspondence to Viktor Todorov, Department of Finance, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA; e-mail: v-todorov@kellogg.northwestern.edu.
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Abstract

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We propose a test for anticipated changes in spot volatility, either due to continuous or discontinuous price moves, at the times of realization of event risk in the form of pre-scheduled releases of economic information such as earnings announcements by firms and macroeconomic news announcements. These events can generate nontrivial volatility in asset returns, which does not scale even locally in time. Our test is based on short-dated options written on an underlying asset subject to event risk, which takes place after the options’ observation time and prior to or after their expiration. We use options with different tenors to estimate the conditional (risk-neutral) characteristic functions of the underlying asset log-returns over the horizons of the options. Using these estimates and a relationship between the conditional characteristic functions with three different tenors, which holds true if and only if continuous and discontinuous spot volatility does not change at the event time, we design a test for this hypothesis. In an empirical application, we study anticipated individual stocks’ volatility changes following earnings announcements for a set of stocks with good option coverage.

Information

Type
ET LECTURE
Information
Econometric Theory , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , February 2025 , pp. 1 - 34
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

Footnotes

We would like to thank the Editor (Peter C.B. Phillips), the Co-Editor (Eric Renault), and three anonymous referees, as well as participants at the 2022 SETA Virtual conference for many useful comments and suggestions. Yang Zhang completed the work in her personal time. The views expressed in this paper are strictly those of the authors and do not represent the opinion of Yang Zhang’s employer.

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