This paper shows empirically how asset risk and financial leverage interact to explain the equity risk dynamics of value versus growth stocks. During economic downturns, the asset betas and leverage of value firms increase, contributing to a sharp rise in equity betas. Asset betas of growth...

Exchange traded funds (ETF) provide a means for investors to access assets indirectly that may be accessible at a high cost otherwise. I show that liquidity segmentation can explain the tendency for ETFs to trade at a premium to NAV as well as the life-cycle pattern in premiums. ETFs with larger...

Some exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are specifically designed for harvesting factor premiums, such as the size, value, momentum and low-volatility effects. Other ETFs, however, may implicitly go against these factors. This paper analyzes the factor exposures of US equity ETFs and finds that,...

We investigate the factor exposure of smart beta ETFs under model uncertainty using Bayesian variable selection. We find that smart beta ETFs have exposures to several factors, including size, value, momentum, quality, volatility/low beta, and dividend yield. The average return contribution of...

Some exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are specifically designed for harvesting factor premiums, such as the size, value, momentum, and low-volatility effects. Other ETFs, however, may implicitly go against these factors. This paper analyzes the factor exposures of U.S. equity ETFs and finds that,...

Many financial instruments are designed with embedded leverage such as options and leveraged exchange traded funds (ETFs). Embedded leverage alleviates investors' leverage constraints and, therefore, we hypothesize that embedded leverage lowers required returns. Consistent with this hypothesis,...

The variance risk premium (VRP) reflects the degree of risk aversion of investors and the overestimation of the probability of extreme losses. We examine a variety of variance risk premiums, including both the upside and downside variance risk premiums, in the Chinese stock market. We find that...

We show that the prices of risk for factors that are nonlinear in the market return are readily obtained using index option prices. The price of co-skewness risk corresponds to the market variance risk premium, and the price of co-kurtosis risk corresponds to the market skewness risk premium....

We investigate whether a model with time-varying probability of economic disaster can explain prices of collateralized debt obligations. We focus on senior tranches of the CDX, an index of credit default swaps on investment grade firms. These assets do not incur losses until a large fraction of...

Among leveraged funds, leveraged ETFs are designed to achieve multiple exposure (e.g., twice) to some financial index returns, on a daily basis. In this paper, we derive an analytical expression for the value process of a leveraged ETF. We analyze it as a convex constant allocation portfolio...