Estimating State Price Densities by Hermite Polynomials: Theory and Application to Italian Derivatives Market

We study the problem of extracting the state price densities from the market prices of listed options. Adapting a model of Madan and Milne to a multiple expiration setting, we present an estimation method for the risk-neutral probability at a moving horizon of fixed length. With the exception of volatility, all model parameters can be estimated by linear regression and their number can be chosen arbitrarily, depending on the size of the dataset. We discuss empirical issues related to the application of this model to real data and show results on listed options on the Italian MIB30 equity index.