Based on Chen and Zhao's (2009) criticism of VAR based return decompositions, we explain in detail the various limitations and pitfalls involved in such decompositions. First, we show that Chen and Zhao's interpretation of their excess bond return decomposition is wrong: the residual component...

In this paper, we scrutinize the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns. As a novelty, the idiosyncratic volatility is obtained by conditioning upon macro-finance factors as well as upon traditional asset pricing factors. The macro-finance factors are...

The dynamic dependencies in financial market volatility are generally well described by a long-memory fractionally integrated process. At the same time, the volatility risk premium, defined as the difference between the ex-post realized volatility and the market’s ex-ante expectation thereof,...

We study the directional predictability of monthly excess stock market returns in the U.S. and ten other markets using univariate and bivariate binary response models. Our main interest is on the potential benefits of predicting the signs of the returns jointly, focusing on the predictive power...

This paper develops a new systematic approach to implement approximate solutions to asset pricing models within multi-factor diffusion environments. For any model lacking a closed-form solution, we provide a solution obtained by expanding the analytically intractable model around a known...

Stock market volatility clusters in time, carries a risk premium, is fractionally integrated, and exhibits asymmetric leverage effects relative to returns. This paper develops a first internally consistent equilibrium based explanation for these longstanding empirical facts. The model is cast in...

This paper finds empirical support for the habit persistence model of Camp- bell and Cochrane (1999) along both cross sectional and time-series dimensions of the US stock market. GMM estimations show that the model is able to explain a substantial part of the cross sectional variation of returns...

We find that the difference between implied and realized variation, or the variance risk premium, is able to explain more than fifteen percent of the ex-post time series variation in quarterly excess returns on the market portfolio over the 1990 to 2005 sample period, with high (low) premia...

We test for price discontinuities, or jumps, in a panel of high-frequency intraday returns for forty large-cap stocks and an equiweighted index from these same stocks. Jumps are naturally classified into two types: common and idiosyncratic. Common jumps affect all stocks, albeit to varying...

Most recent empirical option valuation studies build on the affine square root (SQR) stochastic volatility model. The SQR model is a convenient choice, because it yields closed-form solutions for option prices. However, relatively little is known about the resulting biases. We investigate...