We analyze the cross-sectional differences in the tail risk of equity returns and identify the drivers of tail risk. We provide two statistical procedures to test the hypothesis of cross-sectional downside tail shape homogeneity. An empirical study of 230 US non-financial firms shows that...

This paper investigates how the downside tail risk of stock returns is differentiated cross-sectionally. Stock returns follow heavy-tailed distributions with downside tail risk determined by the tail shape and scale. If safety-first investors are concerned with sufficiently large downside...