We develop a model of pandemic risk management and firm valuation. We introduce aggregate transmission shocks into an epidemic model and link valuations to infections by using an asset-pricing framework that accounts for vaccines. Infections lower earnings growth but firms can mitigate damages....

We produce novel empirical evidence on the relevance of temperature volatility shocks for the dynamics of macro aggregates and asset prices. Using two centuries of UK temperature data, we document that the relationship between temperature volatility and the macroeconomy varies over time. First,...

We investigate the effects of economic uncertainty on the return volatility of financial assets, including equities, bonds, foreign exchange and commodities. We use several popular measures of economic uncertainty, and find the uncertainty displays significant but heterogeneous effect on...

Time-varying risk premiums are a natural consequence of prudent savings behavior. Prudence prescribes a countercyclical marginal propensity to consume which leads to countercyclical consumption volatility and risk premiums. This "prudential uncertainty" channel is amplified by external habit,...

We quantify disagreement about the economy with ex-ante measures of divergence of opinion among economic forecasters and investigate if economic disagreement has a significant impact on the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. We find a significant disagreement premium of 7.2% per...

We investigate the role of economic uncertainty in the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks and equity portfolios. We estimate stock exposure to an economic uncertainty index and show that stocks in the lowest uncertainty beta decile generate 6% more annualized risk-adjusted return...

Contrary to the theoretical principle that higher risk is compensated with higher expected return, the literature shows that low-risk stocks outperform high-risk stocks. Using a large-scale household dataset, we provide an explanation for this puzzling result that the anomalous negative...

We document the predictive ability and economic significance of global economic policy uncertainty for U.S. equity returns. After orthogonalizing global economic policy uncertainty (global EPU) with respect to the U.S. EPU, we find that it has significant predictive power for aggregate stock...

We study the effect of economic uncertainty exposure (EUE) on cross-sectional return differentiating the mispricing from ambiguity-premium effects. Conditional on a common mispricing index, we find that EUE induces disagreement which amplifies mispricing. The highest EUE quintile produces an...

Utilizing a large sample of actively managed equity funds and a recently developed EPU index for New Zealand, we show that fund flow performance sensitivity decreases with policy uncertainty. The role of policy uncertainty as a determinant of fund flow performance sensitivity is found to be...