This Paper investigates the link between a firm’s competitive environment and the idiosyncratic volatility of its stock returns. We find that firms enjoying high market power, or established in concentrated industries, have lower idiosyncratic volatility. We posit that competition affects...

There is a large body of literature documenting both a preference for immediacy and a tendency to procrastinate. O'Donoghue and Rabin (1999a,b, 2001) and Choi et al. (2005) model these behaviours as two faces of the same phenomenon. In this paper, we use a combination of lab, field, and survey...

Among the most important pieces of empirical evidence against the standard representative-agent, consumption-based asset pricing paradigm are the formidable unconditional Euler equation errors the model produces for a broad stock market index return and short-term interest rate. Unconditional...

This paper explores the effects of the US business cycle on US stock market returns through an analysis of the equity risk premium. We propose a new methodology based on the SDF approach to asset pricing that allows us to uncover the different effects of aggregate demand and supply shocks. We...

This paper provides evidence on the use of stochastic discount factors in the evaluation of portfolio performance. First, we discuss evaluation in this setting, and relate it to traditional mean-variance analysis. We then use Monte Carlo experiments to examine the small sample properties of...

We develop a simple approach to valuing stocks in the presence of learning about average profitability. The market-to-book ratio (M/B) increases with uncertainty about average profitability, especially for firms that pay no dividends. M/B is predicted to decline over a firm's lifetime due to...

The extreme levels of stock price volatility found during the Great Depression have often been attributed to political uncertainty. This Paper performs an explicit test of the Merton/Schwert hypothesis that doubts about the survival of the capitalist system were partly responsible. It does so by...

This Paper characterizes the term structure of risk measures such as Value at Risk (VaR) and expected shortfall under different econometric approaches including multivariate regime switching, GARCH-in-mean models with student-t errors, two-component GARCH models and a non-parametric bootstrap....

This Paper studies whether the consumption-based asset-pricing model can explain the cross-section of Sharpe ratios. The constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) model and several extensions (habit persistence, recursive utility and idiosyncratic shocks) all imply that the Sharpe ratio is linearly...

In this paper, we investigate the importance of different loss functions when estimating and evaluating option pricing models. Our analysis shows that it is important to take into account parameter uncertainty, since this leads to uncertainty in the predicted option price. We illustrate the...