Implied Risk Preferences from Option Prices: Evidence from KOSPI 200 Index Options

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the risk averse ness of KOSPI 200 option investors with very flexible risk preference structure. Contrary to the most of previous research either assuming a time-invariant underlying asset return distribution or assuming a well-known functional form for the underlying utility functions. we directly assume functional forms for Investors’risk aversion functions. With the direct specification on the risk aversion functions themselves. we can avoid the possibility 이 suffering from Internal inconsistency and of obtaining misleading risk aversion functions. From our empirical results using KOSPI 200 Index option prices from 1997 through 2006. we discovered that the investors' relative risk aversions exhibit ‘sharply decreasing' across wealth. In addition, our Implied subjective PDFs are found to more accurately forecast the distribution of realization than both the risk neutral PDFs and implied subjective PDFs from previous methods. For the robustness of our empirical results, we test the effects of estimation errors In the expected risk premium, and of financial crisis in the late of 1990s.