IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rfinst/v23y2010i1p271-303.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ex-dividend Arbitrage in Option Markets

Author

Listed:
  • Jia Hao
  • Avner Kalay
  • Stewart Mayhew

Abstract

We examine the behavior of call options surrounding the underlying stock's ex-dividend date. The evidence is inconsistent with the predictions of a rational exercise policy; a significant fraction of the open interest remains unexercised, resulting in a windfall gain to option writers. This triggers a sophisticated trading scheme that enables short-term traders to receive a significant fraction of the gains. The trading scheme inflates reported volume and distorts its traditional relations to liquidity. The dramatic increases in the volume of trade on the last cum-dividend day are facilitated by limitations on transaction costs passed by the various option exchanges. The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org., Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Jia Hao & Avner Kalay & Stewart Mayhew, 2010. "Ex-dividend Arbitrage in Option Markets," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 23(1), pages 271-303, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:23:y:2010:i:1:p:271-303
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhp038
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pool, Veronika Krepely & Stoll, Hans R. & Whaley, Robert E., 2008. "Failure to exercise call options: An anomaly and a trading game," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 11(1), pages 1-35, February.
    2. Harris, Lawrence E. & Hartzmark, Samuel M. & Solomon, David H., 2015. "Juicing the dividend yield: Mutual funds and the demand for dividends," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(3), pages 433-451.
    3. Amber Anand & Jian Hua & Tim McCormick, 2016. "Make-Take Structure and Market Quality: Evidence from the U.S. Options Markets," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(11), pages 3271-3290, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:23:y:2010:i:1:p:271-303. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfsssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.