Learning, confidence, and option prices

The option-market evidence suggests that investors are concerned with large downward moves in equity prices, which occur once every one to two years in the data. This evidence is puzzling because there are no concurrent jumps in macroeconomic fundamentals. I estimate a confidence-risk model where agents use a constant gain specification to learn about the unobserved expected growth from the cross-section of signals. While consumption shocks are Gaussian, investors’ uncertainty (confidence measure) is subject to jumps, which endogenously trigger jump risks in equity and option markets. The model provides a good fit to macroeconomic, equity, option, and forecast data.