This paper examines the relationship between select macroeconomic factors (i.e., GDP, Inflation, Interest Rate, Exchange Rate and Money Supply) and aggregate stock returns in emerging markets constituting the BRICS block over the period 1995 to 2014 using quarterly panel data. This relationship...

Are recent asset pricing tests informative as they seem? The critiques of Roll and, more recently, of Berk are well known, though they have not been raised much in the asset pricing literature over the last 15 years. We explore this question using two sources of expected returns, realised...

Current empirical asset pricing research on idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL), negatively related to cross-sectional expected returns, fails to take explicit account of risk that results from a shock to a network of economically related stocks. These stocks move together, and are therefore...

I derive an equilibrium asset pricing model incorporating both systematic and idiosyncratic return asymmetries, and show their respective impact on expected returns. With systematic return asymmetry, investors allocate their wealth between the risk-free security, the market portfolio, and a...

Inspired by Aumann and Serrano (2008) and Foster and Hart (2009), we propose risk-neutral options' implied measures of riskiness and investigate their significance in predicting the cross section of expected returns per unit of risk. The empirical analyses indicate a negative and significant...

This paper studies the relative importance of discount rates and cash flows with a focus on the differences between time-series and cross-sectional variance tests. I show that the following holds for the market, different types of portfolios, and individual stocks: (a) changes in expected...

We propose a new measure of time-varying tail risk that is directly estimable from the cross section of returns. We exploit firm-level price crashes every month to identify common fluctuations in tail risk across stocks. Our tail measure is significantly correlated with tail risk measures...

I build a price-ratio model based on the Campbell and Shiller (1988) decomposition to test which components of investor expectations best explains cross-sectional price differences. I evaluate the in- and out-of-sample performance of my model, which uses a higher-order expansion with an added...