Option Markets in the Age of Robinhood (and before)
speaker: Albina Danilova (London School of Economics and Political Science)abstract: We consider an economy in which some agents do not continuously hedge their position in derivative assets using the underlying assets market – i.e. we study the effects of an imbalanced derivate market. We show that, even in the presence of complete markets, the imbalance significantly alters the equilibrium price process of the underlying assets: risk premia and volatility become stochastically time varying, hence option implied volatility is characterized by smile and smirk pat- terns, momentum-like price dynamics arise as well as price spillovers across under- lying assets. Moreover, the derivative imbalance generates self-fulfilling equilibria, e.g. if the imbalance takes the form of a bet on an increase in asset volatility, then the equilibrium volatility does increase. Finally, since our formulation is extremely general, our results also apply to segmented markets where some investments are achievable only via financial intermediation.
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