Regulations have unanticipated consequences for liquidity in the corporate bond market. In this paper, I show that while the bid-ask spread has been declining, corporate bond liquidity premium has actually increased since the financial crisis. The cross-sectional variation in the corporate bond...

We model the human brain as the ultimate scarce, efficient, and rational resource that first must optimize on itself before optimizing on the resources available in the external world. We show that a new unified explanation for the equity premium puzzle, countercyclical equity premia, value...

Recent evidence indicates the value premium declined over time. In this paper, we argue this decline happened because book equity, BE, is no longer a good proxy for fundamental equity, FE, defined as the equity value originating purely from expected cash flows (i.e., no discount rate differences...

The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a convincing approach towards resolving prominent asset pricing puzzles. Whilst the simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a...

Rational asset pricing models should hold across assets. Nevertheless, in practice they are often developed and tested on a single asset pricing anomaly. This approach can lead to an overabundance of idiosyncratic ‘rational' explanations. The paper demonstrates the problem by showing that...

While existing asset pricing studies focus on macroeconomic variables to predict stock market risk premium, we find that an aggregate index of corporate activities has substantially greater predictive power both in- and out-of sample, and yields much greater economic gain for a mean-variance...

Financial markets provide a natural quantitative lab for understanding some of the most advanced human behaviours. Among them is the invention and use of mathematical tools known as financial instruments. Besides money, the two most fundamental financial instruments are bonds and equities. More...

The shape of the VIX term structure conveys information about the price of variance risk rather than expected changes in the VIX, a rejection of the expectations hypothesis. A single principal component, Slope, summarizes nearly all this information, predicting the excess returns of S&P 500...

We uncover significant asymmetric effects of realized jump risks on conditional equity premium. Negative or ``bad'' (positive or ``good'') jumps predict a rising (falling) near-term equity premium. The signed jump risk measures remain statistically significant even when we control for the...

The term “equity premium puzzle” was coined in 1985 by economists Rajnish Mehra and Edward C. Prescott. The equity premium puzzle in considered one of the most significant questions in finance. A number of papers have explored the fundamental questions of why the premium exists and has not...