This paper reviews the literature on idiosyncratic equity volatility since the publication of "Have Individual Stocks Become More Volatile? An Empirical Exploration of Idiosyncratic Risk" in 2001. We respond to replication studies by Chiah, Gharghori, and Zhong and by Leippold and Svaton, and we...

This paper uses a disaggregated approach to study the volatility of common stocks at the market, industry, and firm levels. Over the period 1962-97 there has been a noticeable increase in firm-level volatility relative to market volatility. Accordingly correlations among individual stocks and...

This paper uses a disaggregated approach to study the volatility of common stocks at the market, industry, and firm levels. Over the period 1962-97 there has been a noticeable increase in firm-level volatility relative to market volatility. Accordingly correlations among individual stocks and...

This paper studies three different measures of monthly stock market volatility: the time-series volatility of daily market returns within the month; the cross-sectional volatility or 'dispersion' of daily returns on industry portfolios, relative to the market, within the month; and the...

The standard test for the pricing role of aggregate idiosyncratic risk in the conventional predictive regression considers aggregate total idiosyncratic risk a reasonable proxy for its undiversified component, which should be priced as theory suggests. However, when the priced component is...

Despite the debate on the pricing of idiosyncratic risk, it is generally believed that the pricing effect is likely to exist among small stocks due to lack of diversification and information asymmetry predicted by Merton (1987). However, given the size of Asset Under Management, most...

Despite the crucial role of the market factor in Fama and French's three-factor model, the market beta has failed to explain the cross-sectional differences in expected returns proxied by the future realized returns of individual stocks. However, current evidence does not necessarily reject the...

In this paper we show that the failure of the CAPM beta to predict individual stocks' expected returns documented by Fama and French (1992) is largely driven by a small group of stocks with large betas and high idiosyncratic volatilities. These stocks' betas tend to reverse. Therefore, even when...