We study the temporal behavior of the cross-sectional distribution of assets' market exposure, or betas, using a large panel of high-frequency returns. The asymptotic setup has the sampling frequency of the returns increasing to infinity, while the time span of the data remains fixed, and the...

We define risk transfer as the percent change in the market risk exposure for a group of investors over a given period. We estimate risk transfer using novel data on U.S. investors' portfolio holdings, flows, and returns at the security level with comprehensive coverage across asset classes and...

From 1963 through 2015, idiosyncratic risk (IR) is high when market risk (MR) is high. We show that the positive relation between IR and MR is highly stable through time and is robust across exchanges, firm size, liquidity, and market-to-book groupings. Though stock liquidity affects the...

China is the world's largest investor and greatest contributor to global economic growth by wide margins, and will remain so for many years. The efficiency of its financial system in allocating capital to investment will be important to sustain this growth. This paper shows that China's stock...

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 show how uncertainty shapes the asset allocation, composition, productivity, and value of capital-intensive firms. We do so using detailed, near-universal data on shipping firms' new orders, secondary-market transactions, and demolition of ships. Firms curtail both the acquisition and...

Since 1965, average idiosyncratic risk (IR) has never been lower than in recent years. In contrast to the high IR in the late 1990s that has drawn considerable attention in the literature, average market-model IR is 44% lower in 2013-2017 than in 1996-2000. Macroeconomic variables help explain...

We use the prices of credit card asset-backed securities to study the market risk premium associated with unsecured consumer credit risk. The consumer credit risk premium has historically been comparable to high yield corporate bond spreads, but has increased dramatically since the financial...

The cash flows of growth stocks are particularly sensitive to temporary movements in aggregate stock prices (driven by movements in the equity risk premium), while the cash flows of value stocks are particularly sensitive to permanent movements in aggregate stock prices (driven by market-wide...

We selectively survey, unify and extend the literature on realized volatility of financial asset returns. Rather than focusing exclusively on characterizing the properties of realized volatility, we progress by examining economically interesting functions of realized volatility, namely realized...