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Journal of Finance 1985

On Jumps in Common Stock Prices and Their Impact on Call Option Pricing

Clifford A. Ball; Walter N. Torous1

1 Agência Nacional de Energia Elétrica

Abstract

The Black-Scholes call option pricing model exhibits systematic empirical biases. The Merton call option pricing model, which explicitly admits jumps in the underlying security return process, may potentially eliminate these biases. We provide statistical evidence consistent with the existence of lognormally distributed jumps in a majority of the daily returns of a sample of NYSE listed common stocks. However, we find no operationally significant differences between the Black-Scholes and Merton model prices of the call options written on the sampled common stocks.

DOI
10.2307/2328053
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