This paper documents a significantly negative cross-sectional relation between left-tail risk and future returns on individual stocks trading in the U.S. and international countries. We provide a behavioral explanation to this anomaly based on the idea that investors underestimate the...

We quantify disagreement about the economy with ex-ante measures of divergence of opinion among economic forecasters and investigate if economic disagreement has a significant impact on the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. We find a significant disagreement premium of 7.2% per...

We contrast two different asset pricing models, where the pricing kernel either (i) increases in the volatility dimension, reflecting investors' aversion to volatility, or (ii) could be non-monotonic in volatility, reflecting heterogeneity in investors' beliefs. The two models yield opposite...

Option volatilities have significant predictive power for the cross section of stock returns and vice versa. Stocks with large increases in call implied volatilities tend to rise over the following month whereas increases in put implied volatilities forecast future decreases in next-month stock...

We propose a model of volatility tail behavior, in which the pricing measure dominates the physical measure in both tails of the volatility distribution and, hence, the derived pricing kernel exhibits an increasing and decreasing region in the volatility dimension. The model features investors...

We introduce a new, hybrid measure of stock return tail covariance risk, motivated by the under-diversified portfolio holdings of individual investors, and investigate its cross-sectional predictive power. Our key innovation is that this covariance is measured across the left tail states of the...

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 introduce a new, hybrid measure of stock return tail covariance risk, motivated by the under-diversified portfolio holdings of individual investors, and investigate its cross-sectional predictive power. Our key innovation is that this covariance is measured across the left tail states of the...

We introduce a new, hybrid measure of stock return tail covariance risk, motivated by the under-diversified portfolio holdings of individual investors, and investigate its cross-sectional predictive power. Our key innovation is that this covariance is measured across the left tail states of the...

We investigate the relation between downside beta and stock returns in a global context using more than 170 million daily return observations. Contrary to the findings in the U.S. equity market, we show that downside beta does not explain the cross-sectional differences in future and...