We predict bond betas conditioning on a number of macro-finance variables. We explore differences across long-term government bonds, investment grade corporate bonds, and high yield corporate bonds. We conduct out-of-sample forecasting using the new approach of combining predictor variables...

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...

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...

We examine the pricing of tail risk in international stock markets. We find that the tail risk of different countries is highly integrated. Introducing a new World Fear index, we find that local and global aggregate market returns are mainly driven by global tail risk rather than local tail...

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...

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 comprehensively investigate the usefulness of tail risk measures proposed in the literature. We evaluate both the statistical and the economic validity of the measures. The option-implied measure of Bollerslev and Todorov (2011b) (BT11Q) performs the best overall. While some other tail risk...

Several theoretical studies suggest that coordination problems can cause arbitrageur crowding to push asset prices beyond fundamental value as investors feedback trade on each others' demands. Using this logic we develop a crowding model for momentum returns that predicts tail risk when...

Betting-against-risk (BAR) anomaly portfolios formed on past beta and idiosyncratic / total volatility produce large CAPM alphas. But these return spreads are well explained by the Fama--French six-factor model (FF6). Operating profitability, investment, and momentum factors subsume the low-risk...

We conduct an international analysis of the cross-sectional risk premiums of uncertainty risk factors in addition to traditional risk factors. We consider the stock markets in five regions separately. Internationally, uncertainty has negative risk premiums which is similar to previous findings...