The maximum daily return over the previous month (MAX) of Bali et al. (2011) is a strong and significant predictor of future stock returns in non-U.S. equity markets. Once it is controlled for MAX in the cross-section of average returns, the puzzling negative idiosyncratic volatility-return...

When investors have incomplete information, expected returns, as measured by an econometrician, deviate from those predicted by standard asset pricing models by including a term that is the product of the stock’s idiosyncratic volatility and the investors’ aggregated forecast errors. If...

This paper proposes a new approach to estimate the idiosyncratic volatility premium. In contrast to the popular two-pass regression method, this approach relies on a novel GMM-type estimation procedure that uses only a single cross-section of return observations to obtain consistent estimates....