We investigate whether or not a beta increases with bad news and decreases with good news, just as does volatility. Using daily returns for nine stocks in a double beta model with EGARCH specifications, we show that news asymmetrically affects the betas of individual stocks. We find that betas...

Modigliani and Cohn [1979] hypothesize that the stock market suffers from money illusion, discounting real cash flows at nominal discount rates. While previous research has focused on the pricing of the aggregate stock market relative to Treasury bills, the money-illusion hypothesis also has...

Contagion is usually defined as correlation between markets in excess of what would be implied by economic fundamentals; however, there is considerable disagreement regarding the definitions of the fundamentals, how the fundamentals might differ across countries, and the mechanisms that link the...

This paper is an investigation into the determinants of asymmetries in stock returns. We develop a series of cross-sectional regression specifications which attempt to forecast skewness in the daily returns of individual stocks. Negative skewness is most pronounced in stocks that have...

This paper uses a disaggregated approach to study the volatility of common stocks at the market, industry, and firm levels. Over the period 1962-97 there has been a noticeable increase in firm-level volatility relative to market volatility. Accordingly correlations among individual stocks and...

This paper studies three different measures of monthly stock market volatility: the time-series volatility of daily market returns within the month; the cross-sectional volatility or 'dispersion' of daily returns on industry portfolios, relative to the market, within the month; and the...