Using a comprehensive dataset of first, second and third generation commodity indices, we investigate the potential diversification benefits in equity-bond portfolios. The results show that first generation commodity indices are outperformed by enhanced indices. Second generation indices provide...

This paper investigates price jumps in commodity markets. We find that jumps are rare and extreme events but occur less frequently than in stock markets. Nonetheless, jump correlations across commodities can be high depending on the commodity sectors. Energy, metal and grains commodities show...

Researchers and practitioners face many choices when estimating an asset's sensitivities toward risk factors, i.e., betas. We study the effect of different data sampling frequencies, forecast adjustments, and model combinations for beta estimation. Using the entire U.S. stock universe and a...

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...

This paper investigates price jumps in commodity markets. We find that jumps are rare and extreme events but occur less frequently than in stock markets. Nonetheless, jump correlations across commodities can be high depending on the commodity sectors. Energy, metal and grains commodities show...

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...

We confront prominent asset pricing models with the classical out-of-sample cross-sectional test of Fama and MacBeth (1973). For all models, we uncover three main findings: (i) the intercept coefficients are economically large and highly statistically significant; (ii) the cross-sectional factor...

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...

By studying 81 countries over a period of up to 144 years, with different classes of predictor variables and various forecast specifications, we conduct the most comprehensive equity premium predictability analysis to date. We find that excess returns are more predictable in Emerging and...

Researchers and practitioners employ a variety of time-series processes to forecast betas, using either short-memory models or implicitly imposing infinite memory. We find that both approaches are inadequate: beta factors show consistent long-memory properties. For the vast majority of stocks,...