Asset prices are a valuable source of information about financial market participants.expectations about key macroeconomic variables. However, the presence of time-varying risk premia requires an adjustment of market prices to obtain the market’s rational assessment of future price and policy...

We use options and return data to decompose unconditional risk premia into different parts of the return state space. In the data, the entire equity premium is attributable to monthly returns below -11.3%, but returns in the extreme left tail matter very little. In contrast, leading asset...