In a production economy with trade in financial markets motivated by the desire to share labor-income risk and to speculate, we show that speculation increases volatility of asset returns and investment growth, increases the equity risk premium, and reduces welfare. Regulatory measures, such as...

Motivated by extensive evidence that stock-return correlations are stochastic, we analyze whether the risk of correlation changes (affecting diversification benefits) is priced. We propose a direct and intuitive test by comparing option-implied correlations between stock returns (obtained by...

Does the choice of weighting scheme used to form test portfolios influence inferences drawn from empirical tests of asset pricing? To answer this question we first show that, with monthly rebalancing, an equal-weighted portfolio outperforms a value-weighted portfolio in terms of total mean...

Our objective is to understand how financial innovation affects investors' optimal asset-allocation decisions and the economic mechanisms through which these decisions influence financial markets, welfare, and wealth inequality. We show that when some investors, such as households, are less...

Using data on individual stock options, we show that the currently observed option-implied ex ante skewness is positively related to future stock returns. This contrasts with the existing evidence that uses historical stock or option data to estimate skewness and finds a negative skewness-return...

We use forward-looking information from option prices to estimate option-implied correlations and to construct an option-implied predictor of factor betas. With our implied market betas, we find a monotonically increasing risk-return relation, not detectable with standard rolling-window betas,...

We study learning and uncertainty under the factor investing paradigm using an endogenous information model with correlated assets. As investors shift attention from firms towards systematic risk factors, stock prices become less informative, increasing systematic uncertainty and incentivizing...

We test the conditional CAPM with time-varying forward-looking betas, assuming a two-state model for the market risk premium. For market state identification we employ a recursive Markov-switching model based on a forward-looking Sentiment factor. The empirical results for our sample of...

We study the partial equilibrium portfolio optimization problem for a myopic CRRA investor who can trade options on individual stocks. Applying the parametric portfolio approach of Brandt, Santa-Clara, and Valkanov (forthcoming) to derivatives, we show that options characteristics (such as...

Many asset pricing theories treat the cross-section of returns volatility and correlations as two intimately related quantities driven by common factors, which hinders achieving a neat definition of a correlation premium. We formulate a model without factors, but with a continuum of securities...