We investigate intermediary asset pricing theories empirically and find strong support for models that have intermediary leverage as the relevant state variable. A parsimonious model that uses detrended dealer leverage as a price-of-risk variable, and innovations to dealer leverage as a pricing...

We conduct a comprehensive asset pricing analysis for the U.S. property/liability insurance industry using monthly data from 1988 to 2015. We find that state-of-the-art models such as the Fama and French (2015) five-factor model cannot explain the returns of property/liability insurance stocks...

The Asset pricing literature has produced hundreds of risk factor candidates aimed at explaining the cross-section of expected excess returns, although risk factors which are in fact capable of providing independent information remains an open question. Appling a sparse model, Kozak, Nagel, and...

We examine whether equity return dispersion, measured by the cross-sectional standard deviation of stock returns, is systematically priced in the cross-section of stock returns in China. We find that return dispersion carries a positive price of risk even after controlling for market, size,...

Assuming that risk premiums are determined by failure risk, we present a stylized model of interactions among risk-proxy variables, external financing, and stock returns in which a common mispricing factor, involving operating profit and external financing, drives the following five asset...

We examine the pricing of tail risk in international stock markets. We find that the tail risk of different countries is highly integrated. Introducing a new World Fear index, we find that local and global aggregate market returns are mainly driven by global tail risk rather than local tail...

This study examines whether investors’ attitudes toward ambiguity can explain cross-sectional stock returns by investigating the relationship between future stock returns and option-implied volatilities as well as implied third moments. We find that investors’ attitudes toward different...

We show that the pattern of positive pre-announcement market drift is present not only for FOMC announcements, as documented by Lucca and Moench (2015), but also for other major macroeconomic announcements such as Nonfarm Payroll, ISM and GDP. This commonality in pre-announcement returns leads...