Average skewness, which is defined as the average of monthly skewness values across firms, performs well at predicting future market returns. This result still holds after controlling for the size or liquidity of the firms or for current business cycle conditions. We also find that average...

Low probability events are overweighted in the pricing of out-of-the-money index puts and single stock calls. This behavioral bias is strongly time-varying, and is linked to equity market sentiment and higher moments of the risk-neutral density. We find that our implied volatility (IV) sentiment...

Industries are economically linked through customer-supplier trade flows. We show that industry shocks propagating along this inter-sectoral trade network can feed back to the originating industry, causing an "echo" -- intermediate-term autocorrelation in returns. Adopting techniques from graph...

The authors investigate multiplicate relationships between investor attention and gold futures return. The Vector Auto Regression (VAR) estimates demonstrate that investor attention exhibits significant impact on gold futures returns and the effect can be positive or negative depending on how...

Low probability events are overweighted in the pricing of out-of-the-money index puts and single stock calls. We find that this behavioral bias is strongly time-varying, linked to equity market sentiment, and higher moments of the risk-neutral density. An implied volatility (IV) sentiment...

We build a macroeconomic model for Switzerland, the Euro Area, and the USA that drives the dynamics of several asset classes and the liabilities of a representative Swiss (defined-contribution) pension fund. This encompassing approach allows us to generate correlations between returns on assets...

Tests of excessive volatility along the lines of Shiller (1981) and Leroy and Porter (1981) count among the most convincing pieces of evidence against the validity of the time-honored efficient market hypothesis. Recently, using Shiller s distinction between ex-ante rational (fundamental) price...

The level of daily stock returns is generally regarded as unpredictable. Instead of the level, we focus on the signs of these returns and generate forecasts using various statistical classification techniques, such as logistic regression, generalized additive models, or neural networks. The...

Aggregate implied volatility spread (IVS), defined as the cross-sectional average difference in the implied volatilities of at-the-money call and put equity options, is significantly and positively related to future stock market returns at daily, weekly, monthly, to semiannual horizons. This...

What is the policy uncertainty surrounding expiring taxes? How uncertain are the approvals of routine extensions of temporary tax policies? To answer these questions, I use event studies to measure cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) for firms that claimed the U.S. research and development (R&D)...