I argue that delegated portfolio management can cause the equilibrium relation between CAPM beta and expected stock returns to become flat, instead of linearly positive, and propose an alternative to the widely used Fama and French (1993) 3-factor asset pricing model which incorporates this...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) predicts a positive relation between risk and return, but empirical studies find the actual relation to be flat, or even negative. This paper provides a broad overview of explanations for this ‘volatility effect' that have been proposed in different...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) predicts a positive relation between risk and return, but empirical studies find the actual relation to be flat, or even negative. This paper provides a broad overview of explanations for this ‘volatility effect' that have been proposed in different...

Some exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are specifically designed for harvesting factor premiums, such as the size, value, momentum and low-volatility effects. Other ETFs, however, may implicitly go against these factors. This paper analyzes the factor exposures of US equity ETFs and finds that,...

A stock's exposure to systematic risk factors is surrounded by substantial uncertainty. This beta uncertainty is both economically and statistically significantly priced in the cross-section of stock returns. Stocks with high beta uncertainty substantially under-perform those with low beta...

We examine the pricing of tail risk in international stock markets. Studying all MSCI Developed and Emerging Markets countries, we find that the tail risk of these countries is highly integrated. We find that both local and our newly computed global tail risk strongly predict global equity index...

We study the term structure of variance (total risk), systematic, and idiosyncratic risk. Consistent with the expectations hypothesis, we find that, for the entire market, the slope of the term structure of variance is mainly informative about the path of future variance. Thus, there is little...

Researchers and practitioners face many choices when estimating an asset's sensitivities toward risk factors, i.e., betas. Using the entire U.S. stock universe and a sample period of more than 50 years, we find that a historical estimator based on daily return data with an exponential weighting...

When using high-frequency data, the conditional CAPM can explain asset-pricing anomalies. Using conditional betas based on daily data, the model works reasonably well for a recent sample period. However, it fails to explain the size anomaly as well as 3 out of 6 of the anomaly component excess...

We conduct a comprehensive comparison of market beta estimation techniques. We study the performance of several historical, time-series model, and option implied estimators for estimating realized market beta. Thereby, we find the hybrid methodology of Buss and Vilkov (2012) to consistently...