The demand for durable goods is more cyclical than that for nondurable goods and services. Consequently, the cash flow and stock returns of durable-good producers are exposed to higher systematic risk. Using the NIPA input-output tables, we construct portfolios of durable-good, nondurable-good,...

Unlike passive management, where investors almost do not buy and sell securities, active management involves a set of trading rules that govern investment decisions regarding mainly market timing. In this paper, we take the basics of active management and the two fund separation approach, to...

A rapidly growing literature has documented important improvements in volatility measurement and forecasting performance through the use of realized volatilities constructed from high-frequency returns coupled with relatively simple reduced-form time series modeling procedures. Building on...

Testing procedures for predictive regressions with lagged autoregressive variables imply a suboptimal inference in presence of small violations of ideal assumptions. We propose a novel testing framework resistant to such violations, which is consistent with nearly integrated regressors and...

Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market...

Prominent financial stock pricing models are built on assumption that asset returns follow a normal (Gaussian) distribution. However, many authors argue that in the practice stock returns are often characterized by skewness and kurtosis, so we test the existence of the Gaussian distribution of...

Asymmetric volatility in equity markets has been widely documented in finance, where two competing explanations, as considered in Bekaert and Wu (2000), are the financial leverage and the volatility feedback hypothesis. We explicitly test for the role of both hypotheses in explaining extreme...

We introduce a “bad environment-good environment” (BEGE) technology for consumption growth in a consumption-based asset pricing model with external habit formation. The model generates realistic non-Gaussian features of consumption growth and fits standard salient features of asset prices...

In this paper, we examine the effect of volatility persistence in explaining excess returns in conjunction with established factors. We use an I-GARCH model to estimate volatility persistence for each company on the NYSE for each year between 1989 and 2014. We find that volatility persistence is...