Historically, commodity futures have had excess returns similar to those of equities. But what should we expect in the future? The usual risk factors are unable to explain the time-series variation in excess returns. In addition, our evidence suggests that commodity futures are an inconsistent,...

We study the nature of systemic sovereign credit risk using CDS spreads for the U.S. Treasury, individual U.S. states, and major European countries. Using a multifactor affine framework that allows for both systemic and sovereign-specific credit shocks, we find that there is considerable...

In a model with heterogeneous-risk-aversion agents facing margin constraints, we show how securities' required returns are characterized both by their betas and their margin requirements. Negative shocks to fundamentals make margin constraints bind, lowering risk-free rates and raising Sharpe...

The "Masters Hypothesis" is the claim that unprecedented buying pressure from new financial index investors created a massive bubble in agricultural futures prices at various times in recent years. This paper analyzes the market impact of financial index investment in agricultural futures...

We present a simple methodology that integrates commodity and asset pricing models. Given current evidence on the financialization of commodity markets, valuable information about commodity risk premiums can be extracted from asset pricing models and used to substantially improve the estimates...

Many financial instruments are designed with embedded leverage such as options and leveraged exchange traded funds (ETFs). Embedded leverage alleviates investors' leverage constraints and, therefore, we hypothesize that embedded leverage lowers required returns. Consistent with this hypothesis,...

Stocks with large increases in call implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have high future returns while stocks with large increases in put implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have low future returns. Sorting stocks ranked into decile portfolios by past call...

We develop a new parametric estimation procedure for option panels observed with error which relies on asymptotic approximations assuming an ever increasing set of observed option prices in the moneyness- maturity (cross-sectional) dimension, but with a fixed time span. We develop consistent...