Jayanth Rama Varma

We use the Indian stock options market to study the evolution of uncertainty and asymmetric uncertainty around earnings announcements (EAs). We find that uncertainty (implied volatility) and asymmetric uncertainty (options skew) increase monotonically before the EA day and decrease after EA. Options volume (relative to spot and to futures) also exhibits similar behavior, suggesting that informed investors prefer options markets to spot and futures markets. Both options skew and put-to-call volume ratio can predict the sign of the EA surprise one day before EA, indicating that price discovery and information assimilation happen in the options market.

The options smile provides forward‐looking information about the risk at the center of the distribution (ATM‐IV) and at the tails (Skew). We investigate the cross‐sectional determinants of the options smile using indices that capture firm fundamental risks, heterogeneity in belief, lottery characteristics, and bubble characteristics. We find that at‐the‐money (ATM) volatility is explained mainly by historical risks and predicted future risks measured using accounting‐based risk measures and firm characteristics. However, the cross‐sectional variation in the skew is driven by risk premia and by buying and selling pressure, which is influenced by heterogeneity in belief and the underlying's lottery‐like and bubble‐like characteristics.

Could the COVID‐19 related market crash and subsequent rebound be explained as a rational response to evolving conditions? Our results using multiple forward‐looking measures of uncertainty implied from stock option prices suggest so. First, we find a gradual build‐up of volatility during the month preceding the spike at the start of the pandemic. Second, while tail risk declined after government interventions, the level of uncertainty remained elevated for stocks across industries. Third, the dynamics of decline in tail risk in stocks was industry‐dependent, suggesting that the market performed a fine‐grained analysis of each stock's uncertainty through the pandemic.

We propose a mechanism that uses the financial markets to mobilize the resources of a large population of investors, to revive the impaired assets in the real sector in India today. This should also allow the economy to escape from the strangle hold of the “doom loop”, in which the financial sector, the infrastructure and real estate sectors and the economy in general through their feedback effects on each other, portend to take the economy deeper into the recession. The mechanism where the government covers the left tail risk in infrastructure and real estate, has the potential to revive these assets to the benefit of the home buyers, users and the public, with the government earning a handsome return, while being fair to the developers as well. With such a mechanism in place, in the future, developers would know that using distressed public value to their advantage would not be possible in the future.

Recent literature reports higher single stock options (SSO) volume before earnings announcements (EA). There are no studies that explore single stock futures (SSF) in this context because of illiquid SSF markets in developed countries. Similar to SSO, SSF provide embedded leverage and facilitate short selling although at a lower cost, but do not provide downside‐risk protection. India’s liquid SSO and SSF provide a unique setting to study the preference of informed traders. We observe an increase in both SSO and SSF volume before EA. Further, SSF dominate SSO possibly due to SSO becoming expensive before EA and higher information leakage in India.

We study the pricing of equity options in India which is one of the world's largest options markets. Our findings are supportive of market efficiency: A parsimonious smile‐adjusted Black model fits option prices well, and the implied volatility (IV) has incremental predictive power for future volatility. However, the risk premium embedded in IV for Single Stock Options appears to be higher than in other markets. The study suggests that even a very liquid market with substantial participation of global institutional investors can have structural features that lead to systematic departures from the behavior of a fully rational market while being “microefficient.”