Average skewness, which is defined as the average of monthly skewness values across firms, performs well at predicting future market returns. This result still holds after controlling for the size or liquidity of the firms or for current business cycle conditions. We also find that average...

"This paper studies strategic asset allocation and consumption choice in the presence of regime switching in asset returns. We find evidence that four separate regimes - characterized as crash, slow growth, bull and recovery states - are required to capture the joint distribution of stock and...