Drawing on a novel database of the 401(k) plans of 296 firms, we examine the international equity allocations of 3.8 million individuals over the period 2005-2011. We find enormous cross-individual variation, ranging from zero to more than 75%, and strong cohort effects, with younger cohorts...

Drawing on a novel database of the 401(k) plans of 296 firms, we examine the international equity allocations of 3.8 million individuals over the period 2005-2011. We find enormous cross-individual variation, ranging from zero to more than 75%, and strong cohort effects, with younger cohorts...

We examine international stock return comovements using country-industry and country-style portfolios as the base portfolios. We first establish that parsimonious risk-based factor models capture the covariance structure of the data better than the popular Heston- ouwenhorst (1994) model. We...

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility (“uncertainty”), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

We decompose the squared VIX index, derived from US S&P500; options prices, into the conditional variance of stock returns and the equity variance premium. We evaluate a plethora of state-of-the-art volatility forecasting models to produce an accurate measure of the conditional variance. We then...

We study how monetary policy and risk shocks affect asset prices in the US, the euro area, and Japan, differentiating between "traditional" monetary policy and communication events, each decomposed into "pure" and information shocks. Communication shocks from the US spill over to risk in the...

We study the economic sources of stock-bond return comovement and its time variation using a dynamic factor model. We identify the economic factors employing structural and non-structural vector autoregressive models for economic state variables such as interest rates, (expected) inflation,...

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility (“uncertainty”), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

Despite a large and growing theoretical literature on flights to safety, there does not appear to exist an empirical characterization of flight-to-safety (FTS) episodes. Using only data on bond and stock returns, we identify and characterize flight to safety episodes for 23 countries. On...

Implied volatility indices should have information about risk parameters, once they are cleansed of the influence of normal volatility dynamics and macroeconomic uncertainty. Building on intuition from the dynamic asset pricing literature, we uncover unobserved risk aversion and fundamental...