We analyze a firm's choice between dividend payments and stock repurchases under heterogeneous beliefs and the subsequent long-term stock return performance of firms adopting the two forms of payout. Firm insiders, owning a certain fraction of its equity, choose between paying out its cash...

This paper uses the volatility surface data from options contracts to document a strong, robust, and positive cross-sectional relation between risk-neutral skewness (RNS) and subsequent stock returns. The differential return between high and low RNS stocks amounts to 0.17% per week....

The prevailing view of implied volatility comovements, IVC, defined as the correlation between a firm's implied volatility and the market's implied volatility, is that they indicate the presence of systematic volatility risk to the firm's investors. We take a different stance and conjecture that...

Momentum stocks are exposed to aggregate volatility risk. This paper estimates an EGARCH model of market volatility to introduce a new volatility risk factor that prices itself, and thereby becomes a candidate risk factor for analyzing stock market anomalies such as momentum. Winners have...

Recent empirical evidence has shown that the relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and a stock's expected return depends on the pricing of the stock: it is negative among overvalued stocks and positive among undervalued ones. We provide both theoretical and numerical evidence that this...

We examine the market for U.S. equity real estate investment trusts (REITs) for evidence of the volatility effect, in which low volatility stocks tend to outperform high volatility ones, as has been found in the general equity market by prior research. While there is some evidence of a...

This study examines the relation between aggregate volatility risk and the cross-section of stock returns in Australia. We use a stock's sensitivity to innovations in the ASX200 implied volatility (VIX) as a proxy for aggregate volatility risk. Consistent with theoretical predictions, aggregate...

Based on data until the mid 2000s, oil price changes were shown to predict international equity index returns with a negative predictive slope. Extending the sample to 2015, we document that this relationship has been reversed over the last ten years and therefore has not been stable over time....

This paper investigates whether realized and implied volatilities of individual stocks can predict the cross-sectional variation in expected returns. Although the levels of volatilities from the physical and risk-neutral distributions cannot predict future returns, there is a significant...

In this note we document interactive relations between the excess volatility and the momentum effect in the cross-section of stock returns over the sample periods of 1963-1989, 1990-2010 and 1963-2010, along the line explored lately in Wang and Ma (2014). The nature of interactive relations...