Which volatility model for option valuation in China? Empirical evidence from SSE 50 ETF options

In early 2015, China launched its first exchange-traded option, the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) 50 ETF option, to meet the increasing demand for financial derivatives. In this article, we provide an intensive empirical investigation of popular discrete-time volatility models in terms of their pricing performance when applied to SSE 50 ETF options. We find that the newly developed models with realized measures significantly outperform conventional GARCH-type models based on daily returns only. In contrast with the U.S. market, our empirical results suggest that the leverage effect is very weak in the Chinese option market.