This paper studies the macroeconomic conditions and policy environments under which stock market booms occurred among ten developed countries during the 20th Century. We find that booms tended to occur during periods of above-average growth of real output, and below-average and falling...

This paper suggests that CAPM-based idiosyncratic variance (IV) correlates negatively with future stock returns because it is a proxy for loadings on discount-rate shocks in Campbell*s (1993) ICAPM. The ICAPM also implies that there are important links between the time-series and cross-sectional...

We use multivariate regime switching vector autoregressive models to characterize the time-varying linkages among the Irish stock market, one of the top world performers of the 1990s, and the US and UK stock markets. We find that two regimes, characterized as bear and bull states, are required...

We use multivariate regime switching vector autoregressive models to characterize the time-varying linkages among short-term interest rates (monetary policy) and stock returns in the Irish, the US and UK markets. We find that two regimes, characterized as bear and bull states, are required to...

This paper revisits the time-series relation between the conditional risk premium and variance of the equity market portfolio. The main innovation is that we construct a measure of the ex ante equity market risk premium using corporate bond yield spread data. This measure is forward-looking and...

In this paper, we use macrovariables advocated by recent authors to make out-of-sample forecast for returns on individual stocks and then sort stocks equally into ten portfolios on this proxy of conditionally expected returns. The average returns increase monotonically from the first decile...

Over the period 1927:Q1 to 2005:Q4, the average CAPM-based idiosyncratic variance (IV) and stock market variance jointly forecast stock market returns. This result holds up quite well in a number of robustness checks, and we show that the predictive power of the average IV might come from its...

The paper analyzes average idiosyncratic volatility in G7 countries. We find that idiosyncratic volatility is highly correlated across countries and there is a significant Granger causality from the U.S. to the other countries and vice versa. Consistent with U.S. data, when combined with stock...

This paper studies the effects of conflict onset on asset markets applying the event study methodology. We consider a sample of 112 conflicts during the period 1974-2004 and find that a sizeable fraction of them had a significant impact on stock market indices and on major commodity prices....

Guo and Savickas [2005] show that aggregate stock market volatility and average idiosyncratic stock volatility jointly forecast stock returns. In this paper, we quantify the economic significance of their results from the perspective of a portfolio manager. That is, we evaluate the performance,...