US securities markets took root after Alexander Hamilton's refunding of the Federal debt in the early 1790s. Accordingly, a market in bonds has been in operation in the US for over two centuries. Until recently, however, little was known about bond market returns prior to 1857. This paper...

We propose a new time-varying peaks over threshold model to study tail risk dynamics in equity markets: the laws of motion for the parameters are defined through the score-based approach. We apply the model to daily returns from U.S. size-sorted decile stock portfolios and show that large firm...

I first show that taking moving averages of the term spread, the dividend yield, and the Shiller’s CAPE, significantly increases their ability to predict one month and 12-month forward equity market excess returns, and the state of the business cycle. Dividend yield, CAPE and term spread are...

A single factor that captures assets' exposure to business-cycle variation in macroeconomic uncertainty can explain the level and cross-sectional differences of asset returns. Specifically, based on portfolio-level tests I demonstrate that fluctuations in uncertainty with persistence ranging...

Using U.S. data from 1926 to 2015, I show that financial skewness?a measure comparing cross-sectional upside and downside risks of the distribution of stock market returns of financial firms?is a powerful predictor of business cycle fluctuations. I then show that shocks to financial skewness are...

The cross-sectional average of pairwise correlations across stocks traded on the NYSE, AMEX, and Nasdaq is a powerful predictor of U.S. economic activity at a horizon of one to four years. Its predictive ability is on a par with the slope of the yield curve and significantly exceeds that of some...