The Impact of Investor Sentiment on Risk Neutral Skewness: Around Financial Crisis Open Access

We examine the relation between investor sentiment proxies and the risk neutral skewness of S&P 500 index option. The risk neutral skewness is estimated by the method of Bakshi, Kapadia and Madan (2003), which is non-parametric method, and the interpolation-extrapolation method and trapezoidal rule is used. We use four sentiment proxies: Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, non-commercial trader's net position of S&P 500 futures market, Baker and Wurgler (2006)'s sentiment index, and bull-bear survey of American Association of Individual Investors. We firstly conduct the regression to find the general relations of two variables, and then examine the lead-lag relation between investor sentiment proxies and risk neutral skewness through VAR analysis. Contrary to the previous studies, we observe that sentiment proxies show different signs by the economic conditions. Overall, the sentiment proxies explain the three-dimension moment better in the crisis in U.S, and especially non-commercial trader's net position of S&P 500 futures market explains bet among the proxies.