Building on intuition from the dynamic asset pricing literature, we uncover unobserved risk aversion and fundamental uncertainty from the observed time series of the variance premium and the credit spread while controlling for the conditional variance, expectations about the macroeconomic...

We use 92,632,873 daily returns for 33,010 US firms to establish the best forecasting model for realized idiosyncratic variances. Comparing forecasts from 10 different models, we find that the most popular models, the martingale and GARCH type models, perform worst. Using the...