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We investigate whether stablecoins are safe havens for traditional cryptocurrencies with fresh evidence from the recent crisis period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results support the safe-haven properties of Tether for both before and during the pandemic. For Digix, a gold-backed stablecoin with relatively small market capitalization, we find a change in characteristics before and during the pandemic, but do not find statistically significant evidence for its safe-haven properties. Furthermore, we document that, when considering the economic benefits and costs of adding safe-haven assets into cryptocurrency portfolios, the one with Tether outperforms both a naked portfolio and the portfolio with a traditional safe-haven asset such as gold.

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According to the empirical finance literature, S&P 500 Index call options frequently violate the stochastic dominance upper bounds. In other words, index call options in the US are frequently overpriced. I propose a theoretical model to explain the reason for this. A simple economic model in this article reveals that when agents are sufficiently heterogeneous, a call option may be overpriced from the perspective of the representative agent. The key economic intuitions can be summarized as follows: First, if agents are sufficiently heterogeneous, a bullish agent, who is hungry for the "exposure" to a stock, may buy an expensive call option from a constrained bearish agent. Second, even though a call option is fairly priced from the perspectives of heterogeneous market participants, it may be overpriced from the perspective of the representative agent. Assuming reasonable parameters of heterogeneity, I find that a call option price violates the representative agent's stochastic dominance upper bound.