Analysing bank-issued option pricing

This paper investigates whether Spanish bank-issued options (warrants) trade under a fair price. The analysis is twofold. Price differences between traditional options and equivalent bank-issued options are analysed. The results show that bank-issued options are systematically overpriced with respect to options and that an important portion of such overpricing is related to market design. We also compare the prices of bank-issued options that have the same payoff functions but different issuers. Strikingly, relative price differences between bank-issued options are also found. Moreover, the analysis of the temporal evolution of the price differences between equivalent bank-issued options reveals that they are not decreasing over time.