Economists have long recognized that investors care differently about downside losses versus upside gains. Agents who place greater weight on downside risk demand additional compensation for holding stocks with high sensitivities to downside market movements. We show that the cross-section of...

International equity returns are characterized by episodes of high volatility and unusually high correlations coinciding with bear markets. We develop models of asset returns that match these patterns and use them in asset allocation. First, the presence of regimes with different correlations...

Stocks with greater downside risk, which is measured by higher correlations conditional on downside moves of the market, have higher returns. After controlling for the market beta, the size effect and the book-to-market effect, the average rate of return on stocks with the greatest downside risk...

This paper is no longer available on-line from the NBER. A revised version of the paper has been published as "Liability-Driven Investment with Downside Risk" in the Journal of Portfolio Management Fall 2013, Vol. 40, No. 1: pp. 71-87

We study the inflation hedging ability of individual stocks. While the poor inflation hedging ability of the aggregate stock market has long been documented, there is considerable heterogeneity in how individual stock returns covary with inflation. Stocks with good inflation-hedging abilities...