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...

In this paper, we document evidence that downside betas tend to comove more than upside betas during a financial crisis, but upside betas tend to comove more than the downside betas during financial booms. We find that the asymmetry between Downside-Beta Comovement and Upside-Beta Comovement is...

This paper considers an institutional investor who is implementing a long-term portfolio allocation strategy using forecasts of financial returns. We compare the performance of two competing macro-finance models, an unrestricted Vector AutoRegression (VAR) and a fully structural Dynamic...

Pastor and Stambaugh (2012) demonstrate that from a forward-looking perspective, stocks are more volatile in the long run than they are in the short run. We investigate how the economic constraint of non-negative equity premia aspects predictive variance. When investors expect non-negative...

We implement a long-horizon static and dynamic portfolio allocation involving a risk-free and a risky asset. This model is calibrated at a quarterly frequency for ten European countries. We also use maximum-likelihood estimates and Bayesian estimates to account for parameter uncertainty. We find...