Using Merton's (1974) structural model corporate debt default, this paper argues that correlation between firm level corporate bond yield changes and stock returns should be informative about firm level default risk of this corporate debt. In particular, as the absolute value of the correlation...

After posting good performance and impressive business growth for over two decades, quantitative equity investment managers have recently produced weak returns. We develop a measure of risk and show how changes in risk provide a common framework to explain past under-performance, as well as...

Expected returns should not only include rewards for accepting the risk of a potential downside loss, but also discounts for potential upside gains. Since investors care differently about upside gains versus downside losses, they require a risk premium for bearing the relative downside risk. We...

This paper revisits what we know about the risk of stocks thanks to a non-US long term database. French stock market risk observed over the last 150 years, presents a long-term rise. Despite peace and economic stability, market risk has never converged to levels seen pre-1914. Reversely, the...

When the pricing kernel is U-shaped, then expected returns of claims with payout on the upside are negative for strikes beyond a threshold, determined by the slope of the U-shaped kernel in its increasing region, and have negative partial derivative with respect to strike in the increasing...

We use a sample of option prices, and the method of Bakshi, Kapadia and Madan (2003), to estimate the ex ante higher moments of the underlying individual securities' risk-neutral returns distribution. We find that individual securities' volatility, skewness, and kurtosis are strongly related to...

In its recent report, the expert committee on commodity futures concludes that futures trade in India has increased the price volatility of largely traded commodities (urad, chana, wheat) during periods of excess liquidity. It finds an increase in prices for commodities that have small market...

This paper proposes a new nonparametric test for conditional independence, which is based on the comparison of Bernstein copula densities using the Hellinger distance. The test is easy to implement because it does not involve a weighting function in the test statistic, and it can be applied in...

Asset liquidity in modern financial markets is a key but elusive concept. A market is often said to be liquid when the prevailing structure of transactions provides a prompt and secure link between the demand and supply of assets, thus delivering low costs of transaction. Providing a rigorous...

We investigate the relation between the risk premia observed in forward foreign exchange markets and international equity markets using the Arbitrage Pricing Theory. If returns on well-diversified equity portfolios explain movements in agents' intertemporal marginal rate of substitution then the...