Working Paper
The empirical performance of option-based densities of foreign exchange
Keller, Joachim G.; Craig, Ben R. (2003)
In this paper, the authors calculate risk-neutral densities (RND) by estimating the daily diffusion process of the underlying futures contract for foreign exchange, based on the price of the American puts and calls reported on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for the end of the day. Their quick and accurate method of calculating the prices of the American options uses higher-order lattices and smoothing of the option's value function at the boundaries to mitigate the nondifferentiability of the payoff boundary at expiration and the early exercise boundary. The authors estimate the diffusion ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 0313

Working Paper
The forecast ability of risk-neutral densities of foreign exchange
Keller, Joachim G.; Craig, Ben R. (2004)
We estimate the process underlying the pricing of American options by using higher-order lattices combined with a multigrid method. This paper also tests whether the risk-neutral densities given from American options provide a good forecasting tool. We use a nonparametric test of the densities that is based on the inverse probability functions and is modified to account for correlation across time between our random variables, which are uniform under the null hypothesis. We find that the densities based on the American option markets for foreign exchange do quite well for the forecasting ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 0409

Working Paper
The forecasting performance of German stock option densities
Craig, Ben R.; Glatzer, Ernst; Scheicher, Martin; Keller, Joachim G. (2003)
In this paper the authors estimate risk-neutral densities (RND) for the largest euro-area stock market (the index of which is the German DAX), reporting their statistical properties, and evaluating their forecasting performance. The authors have applied an innovative test procedure to a new, rich, and accurate data set. They have two main results. First, They have recorded strong negative skewness in the densities. Second, they find evidence for a significant difference between the actual density and the risk-neutral density, leading to the conclusion that market participants were surprised ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 0312