We document that the variance risk premium in asset returns decreases firms' investments.We theoretically model the premium; we find that it increases the value of the real optionto delay an investment and, thus, influences investments negatively. Empirically, we verifythe negative link between...

In assessing drivers of commodity prices and volatility at this stage of the current super-cycle in commodities (year 12 of a projected 25), it is vital to understand that production cost is a fundamental. Moreover, marginal production costs are among the most powerful drivers of commodity...

We propose the debt-equity spread (DES), the difference between the actual and equity-implied credit spreads, as a measure of the valuation gap between debt and equity at the firm and bond level. DES strongly predicts stock and bond returns in opposite directions. A strategy that takes a long...

Let us suppose that presently unimagined is possible, that “the unexpected may happen” (Marshall, 1920, p. 347). Then “human decisions affecting the future, whether personal, political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation since the basis for making such...

We investigate the effect of uncertainty on investment. We employ a unique dataset of 25000 Greek firms' balance sheets for 14 years covering the period before and after the eurozone crisis. A dynamic factor model is employed to proxy uncertainty. The investment performance of 14 sectors is...

We argue the earnings announcement premium is a measure of firm-specific uncertainty aversion. Our stylized model shows earnings announcements, as pure news events, are priced only if investors are uncertainty averse; further, the earnings announcement return is negatively correlated to future...

There is wide debate over the impact of uncertainty on firm behavior, due to the difficulty both of measuring uncertainty and of identifying causality. This paper takes three steps that attempt to address these challenges. First, we develop an instrumental variables strategy that exploits firms'...

I generalize the long-run risks (LRR) model of Bansal and Yaron (2004) by incorporating recursive smooth ambiguity aversion preferences from Klibanoff et al. (2005, 2009) and time-varying ambiguity. Relative to the Bansal-Yaron model, the generalized LRR model is as tractable but more flexible...

This paper employs numerical simulations of the Park and Sabourian (2011) herd model to derive new theory-based predictions for how information risk and market stress influence aggregate herding intensity. We test these predictions empirically using a comprehensive data set of highfrequency and...

Building on Prospect Theory, we apply the concept of loss aversion to the formation of inflation perceptions and test empirically for non-linearities in the inflation-perceptions relation for a panel of 10 Euro area countries. Specifically, under the assumption of loss aversion, inflation...