Motivated by existing evidence of a preference among investors for assets with lottery-like payoffs and that many investors are poorly diversified, we investigate the significance of extreme positive returns in the cross-sectional pricing of stocks. Portfolio-level analyses and firm-level...

This paper examines the intertemporal relation between risk and return for the aggregate stock market using high-frequency data. We use daily realized, GARCH, implied, and range-based volatility estimators to determine the existence and significance of a risk-return tradeoff for several stock...

This paper examines the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic volatility and expected stock returns. The results indicate that (i) data frequency used to estimate idiosyncratic volatility, (ii) weighting scheme used to compute average portfolio returns, (iii) breakpoints utilized to...

This paper introduces a model-independent measure of aggregate idiosyncratic risk based on the mean-variance portfolio theory and the concept of gain from portfolio diversification. With the new approach, there is no need to estimate the covariance terms or the industry-level or firm-level beta...

Using two large hedge fund databases, this paper empirically tests the presence and significance of a cross-sectional relation between hedge fund returns and value at risk (VaR). The univariate and bivariate portfolio-level analyses as well as the fund-level regression results indicate a...

We introduce a new approach to predicting market returns using the cross-section of earnings and book values to explain current stock prices and extract aggregate expected returns. The proposed measure is countercyclical; it portends a significant fraction of the time-series variation in stock...

We examine the role of macroeconomic uncertainty in the cross-section of corporate bonds and find a significant uncertainty premium for both investment-grade (0.40% per month) and non-investment-grade (0.81% per month) bonds. The economic uncertainty premium declines as we progressively remove...

We provide time-series and cross-sectional evidence on the significance of a risk-return tradeoff in the bond and equity markets. We find a significantly positive intertemporal relation between expected return and risk in the bond market. We also propose novel measures of systematic and...

We investigate whether the distributional characteristics of corporate bonds predict the cross-sectional differences in future bond returns. The results indicate a significantly positive (negative) link between volatility (skewness) and expected returns, whereas kurtosis does not make a robust...

This paper presents evidence for a significantly positive link between the dynamic conditional beta and the cross-section of daily stock returns. An investment strategy that takes a long position in stocks in the highest conditional beta decile and a short position in stocks in the lowest...