Over the past 30 years, mutual funds have become the dominant vehicle through which individual investors prepare for retirement via defined contribution plans. Further, money market mutual funds, which hold $2.7 trillion as of September 2013, are now a major part of the cash economy in the U.S....

This paper examines whether investors receive compensation for holding crash-sensitive stocks. We capture the crash sensitivity of stocks by their lower tail dependence (LTD) with the market based on copulas. We find that stocks with strong LTD have higher average future returns than stocks with...