Extracting Information on Implied Volatilities and Discrete Dividends from American Option Prices

This contribution deals with options on assets which pay cash dividends. Pricing methods which consider discrete dividends are usually computationally expensive; a first purpose of this paper is to study efficient and accurate numerical procedures which yield consistent prices for both European and American options in the presence of discrete dividends. We then analyze some methodologies to extract information on volatilities and dividends from observable option prices. Implied dividends can also be computed using a modified version of the well known put-call parity relationship. This technique is straightforward, nevertheless, its use is limited to European options and, when dealing with equities, most traded options are of American-type. As an alternative, numerical inversion of pricing methods can be used. We apply different procedures to obtain implied volatilities and dividends of listed stocks of the Italian Derivatives Market.