We analyze U.S. stock return predictability using a measure of credit standards (Standards) derived from the Federal Reserve Board's Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices. Standards is a strong predictor of stock returns at a business cycle frequency, especially in the...

We examine the connection between tail risk — as measured in Kelly and Jiang (2014) — and the cross-section of expected returns. In conditional predictive regression systems and vector-autoregressions of the market portfolio and the long- and shoresides of the Fama-French factor portfolios,...