We test for the presence of a tail risk premium in the cross-section of mutual fund returns and find that the top tail risk quintile of funds outperforms the bottom by 4.4% per annum. This premium is not simply a reward for market risk, nor do commonly used risk factors offer an adequate...

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,...