Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

We study implications of unpriced "granular measurement errors" -- idiosyncratic shocks to large firms that aren't well-diversified in market indices -- for asset pricing tests and propose alternative tests insensitive to them. We find stronger evidence of an intertemporal relation between the...

Since the seminal paper of Vasicek and Fong (1982), the term structures of interest rates have been fitted assuming that yields are cross-sectionally homoskedastic. We show that this assumption does not hold when there are differences in liquidity, even for bonds of the same issuer. Lower...

We develop a penalized two-pass regression with time-varying factor loadings. The penalization in the first pass enforces sparsity for the time-variation drivers while also maintaining compatibility with the no arbitrage restrictions by regularizing appropriate groups of coefficients. The second...

We propose a simulation-based strategy to estimate and empirically assess a class of asset pricing models that account for rare but severe consumption contractions that can extend over multiple periods. Our approach expands the scope of prevalent calibration studies and tackles the inherent...

The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a convincing approach towards resolving prominent asset pricing puzzles. Whilst the simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a...

This paper studies high-frequency econometric methods to test for a jump in the spread of bond yields. We propose a coherent inference procedure that detects a jump in the yield spread only if at least one of the two underlying bonds displays a jump. Ignoring this inherent connection by basing...

Using data from the Vienna Stock Exchange we investigate three different types of consumption based capital asset pricing models: the well known two state model of Mehra and Prescott, the model of Rietz, which includes also a crash state, and an own four state model. The aim of this Vienna Stock...

The Fama-Macbeth (1973) rolling-beta method is widely used for estimating risk premiums, but its inherent errors-in-variables bias remains an unresolved problem, particularly when using individual assets or macroeconomic factors. We propose a solution with a particular instrumental variable,...

This paper examines the implications of pricing errors and factors that are not strong for the Fama-MacBeth two-pass estimator of risk premia and its asymptotic distribution when T is fixed with n → ∞, and when both n and T → ∞, jointly. While the literature just distinguishes strong and...