This research uses macro factors to explain four standard U.S. stock market risk premia, i.e. the market excess return (RM-RF), size (SMB), value (HML), and momentum (WML). We find in-sample predictive power of macro factors, in particular at a one-year horizon. Differentiating between bull and...

Researchers and practitioners face many choices when estimating an asset's sensitivities toward risk factors, i.e., betas. We study the effect of different data sampling frequencies, forecast adjustments, and model combinations for beta estimation. Using the entire U.S. stock universe and a...

We study the term structure of variance (total risk), systematic and idiosyncratic risk. Consistent with the expectations hypothesis, we find that, for the entire market, the slope of the term structure of variance is mainly informative about the path of future variance. Thus, there is little...

We examine the pricing of tail risk in international stock markets. We find that the tail risk of different countries is highly integrated. Introducing a new World Fear index, we find that local and global aggregate market returns are mainly driven by global tail risk rather than local tail...

Models based on factors such as size, value, or momentum are ubiquitous in asset pricing. Therefore, portfolio allocation and risk management require estimates of the volatility of these factors. While realized volatility has become a standard tool for liquid individual assets, this measure is...

This study tests for a break in the persistence of EMU government bond yield spreads examining data from France, Italy and Spain and using German interest rates as a kind of benchmark. The results reported here provide evidence for breaks between 2006 and 2008. The persistence of the yield...

We derive a novel estimation approach to quantify three-party relocation effects in a dyadic framework. Applied to the effects of civil conflicts on trade, we find robust evidence that importers substitute away from exporters that are engaged in conflict. This trade relocation persists after the...