Contrary to the theoretical principle that higher risk is compensated with higher expected return, the literature shows that low-risk stocks outperform high-risk stocks. Using a large-scale household dataset, we provide an explanation for this puzzling result that the anomalous negative...

Using a measure of ex-ante expected returns based on analyst price targets, we find strong evidence that investors price both systematic (beta and co-skewness) and non-systematic (idiosyncratic volatility) risk when determining the appropriate rate of return on a security. We demonstrate that...

A conditional asset pricing model with risk and uncertainty implies that the time-varying exposures of equity portfolios to the market and uncertainty factors carry positive risk premiums. The empirical results from the size, book-to-market, momentum, and industry portfolios indicate that the...

We introduce a new, hybrid measure of stock return tail covariance risk, motivated by the under-diversified portfolio holdings of individual investors, and investigate its cross-sectional predictive power. Our key innovation is that this covariance is measured across the left tail states of the...

We quantify disagreement about the economy with ex-ante measures of divergence of opinion among economic forecasters and investigate if economic disagreement has a significant impact on the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. We find a significant disagreement premium of 7.2% per...

The low (high) abnormal returns of stocks with high (low) beta - the beta anomaly - is one of the most persistent anomalies in empirical asset pricing research. This paper demonstrates that investors' demand for lottery-like stocks is an important driver of the beta anomaly. The beta anomaly is...

We investigate whether time-series volatility in book-to-market (UNC) is priced in equity returns. UNC captures uncertainty about the current value of the firm's portfolio of assets-in-place and real options, and reflects changes in moneyness and uncertainty in the exercise of these options. UNC...

We investigate the role of economic uncertainty in the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks and equity portfolios. We estimate stock exposure to an economic uncertainty index and show that stocks in the lowest uncertainty beta decile generate 6% more annualized risk-adjusted return...

This paper examines an issue overlooked in the finance and economics literature: time variation in announcement volatility or event risk. We combine long spans of high-frequency data with a flexible parametric model of returns, which al- lows to identify announcement returns, capture intraday...